It wasn't snowing very hard so I decided to take a walk across the fields. My dad was chopping wood for the fire: "Don't get lost," he called as I set out, as if I were some city slicker unfamiliar with the ways of the country. I made my way over the board that serves for a bridge over the dry creekbed, then up through the blackberry and gooseberry canes, past the plum and cherry trees hung now with last night's snowfall. It was late afternoon and the sun had begun to set.
I reached the top of a low rise from where I could see the neighbor's cattle pond, now frozen over. It reminded me of ice skating on a similar pond on my grandparents' farm as a child, of being scooted across the ice on an old chair and dumped head first into a snowbank.
Suddenly the snow began to swirl around me and within moments I was completely disoriented. Through the eddies of white, I could see neither fences nor pond nor the lights of my parents' home. With no landmarks on which to focus, direction was meaningless. Even my tracks were obliterated. But as abruptly as the snow had twisted around me, it stopped. I saw that I had already turned in a completely wrong direction, away from the house. I pinned all my attention on the smoke curling out of the chimney and headed back, skidding down the hillside on my heels.
Whenever my friend Anno and I drive back to Kansas, we look at the map once before leaving. "Looks like a straight shot down through Indiana, then right till we hit Kansas," I figure. "Piece a cake," Anno says. Sometimes, we take the northern route across Illinois, Iowa and a corner of Missouri, gradually angling our way down home. We don't look at the map again until it's time to return. We find our way by following special landmarks.
Along state Route 31 before you reach Indianapolis there is a falling down barn on which someone has painted, "US 1, Libya 0." In Missouri we pass the World's Largest Pecan, a concrete nut on a pedestal. In Ohio, we look for John Wayne's birthplace. It always moves us to recite favorite lines from the Duke's movies ("I won't hit ya. I won't hit ya. The hell I won't"; "If you say 3, mister, you won't hear 10"; and, of course, the best one from True Grit as Rooster Cogburn swings his old carbine over his head and levels it at Lucky Ned Pepper a field away and bellows, "Fill yer hand you sunnavabitch!"). Wayne's boyhood home is full of personal and movie memorabilia, including a meticulously exact reproduction of the very house itself, built entirely of pencils. There are unfortunately, no eye patches for sale such as Wayne wore in True Grit, but such is the nature of landmarks. You must take them as you find them.
Kansas is particularly full of landmarks: the World's Largest Hand Dug Well; the World's Largest Ball of Twine, featured though not credited, in the movie Michael; the 160-acre portrait of Will Rogers plowed into the land near Dodge City, only visible from the air. But these landmarks are available to anyone passing through. For Anno and me, the drive to Topeka is given shape by our own landmarks, personal reference points which remind us of events from our past, escapades, friendships, disappointments, losses, small victories.
Is it possible to lose a landmark? When my family would drive between California and Kansas, we always stopped in Jackrabbit, Arizona. At the general store you could stroke a rabbit pelt or buy a handful of polished desert stones for a quarter or have a cherry drink while enjoying the desert animal zoo: a tarantula in a box, an ancient turtle and a bedraggled owl sitting dejectedly on a tree limb in a cage. The town's main attraction, a giant metal jackrabbit statue, hunched outside the general store. It sat in the full sun, collecting heat and giving off distorted waves. It was shiny and black and once I burned my hand when I couldn't resist touching it. After the interstate highways were built, our route through the desert swung us away from Jackrabbit; since then I have never been able to find it. Probably the desert has covered the store and the zoo and the metal jackrabbit with sand and sage and the bones of old owls, but the landmark is still there in my memories of those trips.
Memories form landmarks for relationships. Conversations, arguments, revelations, laughs, insults all add reference points to the landscape of our relations with each other. Perhaps this is why we tend to enjoy being with the blandly nice but rarely remember anything remarkable about them; it is like riding across a smooth plain devoid of scenery. No bumps, but nothing to remember, either.
In the early '80s I worked as a secretary to Julian Samora, then Notre Dame's director of Chicano Studies. He related wonderful, vivid stories of his struggles against racism, his conversations with Cesar Chavez, his despair when his wife died. He told me the history of the adobe brick he kept in his office; it was a memento of some land ownership problems he'd had and of a house he'd hoped to build. Once he called me into his office to read me a short story by Rodolfo Anaya: "Aw, typing can wait. Listen to this."
We argued about the ancient reel-to-reel tape dictaphone he insisted on using. "It looks like it rusted in the Flood," I protested, even offering to buy something more modern. Dr. S made a deal with me: if I stopped complaining about the dictaphone, he would give me his New Yorker magazines after he'd read them. Deal.
He gave me advice on how to win over my in-laws; when I reported that it hadn't worked, he patted my shoulder. "That's okay. You did the right thing. Now you can sit back and say to hell with 'em."
He loved to talk about food, and we often compared the differences and similarities between the food he'd eaten growing up in the Southwest and what I'd eaten growing up with a Colombian mother. Our Spanish was more similar than not and we shared many anecdotes in Spanglish. He chuckled all morning when I told him about my mother's studies of "el weedie" before she became a citizen. "What is that, mom, 'el weedie'?"
She said impatiently, "Nina, you know, el weedie: We de people of de United State. . ."
At that time, the Chicano Studies office was on a top floor of the library. Once a surly graduate student poked his head into the office: "Don't you people do anything but laugh?"
After I went back to school, I occasionally ran into Dr. S; we would stop and reminisce for a few minutes. The last few times he seemed distracted by health problems and was on his way, he told me once, to see his medicine man. The next time I saw him he seemed remote but polite.
I said, "Dr. S, don't you remember me?"
He said, "Not a bit."
Sometimes he remembered me after that and sometimes not.
I always greeted him, but we had moved into different landscapes; his no longer included the one we had walked through together. It was this fact I regretted most when I learned of Dr. S's death. "It's as if I never existed," I complained. "As if all those conversations never happened."
Lately I have been learning about Alzheimer's. At the nursing home where my dog Dar is a pet therapist there are many Alzheimer's patients. Stroking the dog seems to release powerful memories in some residents, memories of their own dogs, pets they grew up with, the countryside they explored with their dogs at their side, dogs long gone, dogs they can no longer touch. Some will tell me a story about their dog and then, without hesitation, tell it again and again for as long as I stand there.
One man was unable to speak coherently but responded excitedly to Dar, stroking him and making the right kind of sounds. Dar would lay his big head in the man's lap and stand quietly to be scratched and murmured to. One morning, the man began to scream when he saw Dar and hasn't recognized him since. Dar still slows down when we pass his friend's room, but no longer tries to go in. Impossible to know what landmark he forms in their private landscape.
Recently a member of the church I attend was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Immediately I began to feel uncomfortable when I saw him. Would he know me? What should I say? Was he aware of what was happening to him? Surely there was no polite way to ask. One morning he and his wife were standing apart after the service, a little island of two in the congregational fellowship swirling around them. When we made eye contact, I said a quick good morning to the man and then entered into a conversation with his wife. He put both hands on my arm. "Hey," he said gently, "don't forget me."
A rebuke could not have shamed me more than that simple reminder. For those of us not afflicted, Alzheimer's can be a loss of memory of another kind. We forget the person. We act as if we are caught in a snowstorm of confusion, with bits of memories swirling around us, blinding us to familiar landmarks. We lose our place in the present, we lose the person who takes our arm, asking not to be left behind. We think that if they cannot bring to mind the landmarks we once shared, the trip didn't occur. My memories of Dr. Samora still make me smile; the jackrabbit did burn my hand; I can greet my friend at church because to ignore him would be to diminish him and myself. These are landmarks for me, for my own personal voyage to some understanding of the human heart and its memories. We cannot make any demands on the nature of these landmarks; we must take them as we find them.