Right now, I’m sitting at the coffee-house half a block away from where my son first lost faith in me as Omniscient Parent. We were sitting in the old green Jeep, on our way to somewhere, waiting at the traffic light, when he asked me a question about chemistry for his science class — he was maybe in seventh grade.
I told him, “I don’t know — I can’t answer. I’ve never been any good at chemistry.”
His jaw sagged a bit in astonishment. He said something back on the order of, “But Mommy, you know everything.”
I squirmed in my seat a bit — inwardly blushing and agonizing at the same time over the great compliment, whose image was forever shattered in my son’s mind. I wished I was back in sophomore biology lab, reading about the structure of the atom, and trying ever so much harder for the sake of someone who wouldn’t be born for about 15 more years.
But you can’t go back in time, you can’t go home again, and I wouldn’t go through my high school years again if I could at all help it. So there it is. I am non-omniscient mommy.
I think of this scene every once in a while when I pass that place on the street where we’d sat at the time. And I wondered today, as I passed, and remembered, why is memory so entangled with physical place? Surely the stores and sidewalks next to us had nothing to do with our conversation, or my chemical inabilities. The cars that had been parked on the side of the road have (definitely, in this neighborhood) been sold and replaced with one or two other models. Even the time of day is wrong.
Yet the memory waits for me there, small and gray-feathered on its windowsill. Pounces only when it gets bored, I think.
white pebble 