I was standing at my uncle’s kitchen sink, furiously washing dishes before anyone could tell me not to bother while my golden retriever stared at me from the doorway, when it happened. It was a feeling not unlike that scene in the 2010 film Inception when two characters are walking through the streets of Paris inside of a dream and the street folds itself in half, like the pages of a book closing, so that up becomes down and the top becomes the bottom. Just as I was standing there washing the dishes from the dinner I’d just shared with my uncle and my father, listening to their voices in the next room, suddenly I wasn’t. I was my mother and she was washing dishes for her brother and her husband and her own father who were the ones talking on the other side of the wall, and the being in the doorway wasn’t a dog - it was me as a small child, watching her intently. It was a memory mixed with the present, some kind of magic of deja vu and the familiar sounds echoing through a space I could navigate blindfolded.
My uncle lives in his own childhood home. My grandparents moved him and my mother to a small Long Island suburb in the late 1950’s when he was 10 and my mother was in kindergarten. He and my aunt took over ownership of the house when my grandfather died more than 25 years ago. Even though he’s been gone most of my life by now, it is still my grandfather’s house in my mind’s eye - the iron railing on the front porch returned to its rightful place, along with the green metal patio chairs and the round leather living room ottoman that I used to turn on its side and use as a jungle gym.
I could easily disappear into these memories if left to my own devices. The way my grandfather would entertain me with the carpet sweeper (yes, this is what they used before vacuums, and apparently after them too) or insist I take home some knick knack out of his curio for my own shadow box when I’d come with my mom to visit. I knew there was an old cabbage patch doll belonging to one of my cousins in the spare bedroom closet. The Marmaduke magnets on the fridge, the grape jelly jars turned into juice glasses, the mirror above the couch that my very short grandfather would make me stand in front of, shoulder to shoulder with him, until the day I was taller than him. They’re all there, clear as day, and in those memories those people who are gone - lost to me now - are very much alive.
My uncle is a big fan of the 1950’s television show The Twilight Zone, and can easily be tempted to debate the merits of any particular episode - he remembers them all. While there are many arguments to be made for which episode is the best, my uncle’s favorite is from the very first season and is called “Walking Distance”. A man with car trouble wanders from the repair shop down the road to his childhood hometown and finds himself face to face with a younger version of himself. Eventually, after a conversation with his father, he returns to the present day to retrieve his car and move forward with his life. What always stood out to my uncle was the ending of the episode, a closing monologue from Rod Serling that seems more poignant and emotional for the writer than perhaps any other.
Martin Sloan, age thirty-six, vice-president in charge of media. Successful in most things but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives—trying to go home again. And also like all men, perhaps there'll be an occasion, maybe a summer night sometime, when he'll look up from what he's doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope, and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past. And perhaps across his mind there'll flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth. And he'll smile then too, because he'll know it is just an errant wish, some wisp of memory not too important really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man's mind, that are a part of the Twilight Zone.
Back in the kitchen, I’m not my mother anymore. I can clearly see the warm sudsy water running over the serving spoon I’ve been cleaning for the past few minutes. I hear my uncle ask my father where I went off to.
“Oh, leave those things, Jordan,” he calls to me.
“I’m already finished,” I hear my mother’s voice say triumphantly from some other place, and she laughs.