An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [73]
As a life’s work, I would remember everything—everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net. I would trap and keep every teacher’s funny remark, every face on the street, every microscopic alga’s sway, every conversation, configuration of leaves, every dream, and every scrap of overhead cloud. Who would remember Molly’s infancy if not me? (Unaccountably, I thought that only I had noticed—not Molly, but time itself. No one else, at least, seemed bugged by it. Children may believe that they alone have interior lives.)
Some days I felt an urgent responsibility to each change of light outside the sunporch windows. Who would remember any of it, any of this our time, and the wind thrashing the buckeye limbs outside? Somebody had to do it, somebody had to hang on to the days with teeth and fists, or the whole show had been in vain. That it was impossible never entered my reckoning. For work, for a task, I had never heard the word.
WE WERE MOVING THAT SPRING because our beloved grandfather had died, of a brain tumor. It was the year I got a microscope, and traveled with Judy Schoyer to Paw Paw, watched robins fledge from the school library window, and saw the Polyphemus moth walk toward Shadyside; I was now thirteen. I was expecting to attend an upper-school dance at the boys’ school, Shady Side Academy, to which an older boy had invited me, but our grandfather died that day, and our father cried, and the dance was out. I shamed myself by minding that the dance was out.
Our grandfather had been a straitlaced, gentle man, whose mild and tolerant presence had soothed Oma for forty-four years. He doted on Amy and me, from a Scotch-Irish banker’s distance; we loved him. For several weeks that spring as he lay in the hospital, the tumor pressed on his brain in such a way that he could say only one word, “Balls.” Amy and I watched him move on the bed between sheets; he twisted inside a thin hospital gown. Neither of us had seen him angry before; he was angry now, and shocked. “Balls,” he replied to any inquiry, “balls” for hello and “balls” for goodbye. Goodbye it was, and he died.
Oma sadly sold their Pittsburgh house. She and Mary Burinda moved into a pair of penthouse apartments in Shadyside. In the summer, Oma and Mary and Henry lived at Lake Erie. In the fall, they moved back to Pittsburgh and Oma caught opening nights at the Nixon Theater. And for the winter and spring, Oma and Mary moved to Pompano Beach, Florida, where they had an apartment on the water.
Oma sold their house, and we had bought it. A year later we moved from Richland Lane, from the generous house with the glass sunporch under buckeye trees. We moved to Oma’s old stone house, another corner house, high on a hilly street where all the houses were old stone, and all their roofs were old slate, and the few children played—if they played at all—inside.
We lived now on a hushed hill packed with little castles. There were only three, dead-end streets. The longest street, winding silently into the very empyrean, was Glen Arden Drive. The McCulloughs lived at one end of it, and the McCradys at the other. Houses rarely changed hands; from here, there was nowhere in town to move to. The next step was a seat at the right hand of God.
In horizontal space, our family now lived near our first house on Edgerton Avenue, near St. Bede’s Church. In vertical space, we were quite distant from it. Queerly, an inhumanly long and steep flight of outdoor stairs connected our newest neighborhood to our oldest one. These were the Glen Arden steps. From the top of Glen Arden Drive, between two houses, thirty concrete steps descended a scruffy unbuildable cliff to Dallas Avenue below, across the street from St. Bede’s. The steps made a dark old tunnel. They were like the stairway in the poem, the stairway to the sea where down the blind are driven. Their concrete was so rough it ruined your shoes. Children from below played there; Popsicle wrappers and wrecked plastic toys kept the