If Memory Serves Me

Fort Defiance, AZ

Traveling through Arizona, we had a brief window between church visits and I had a sentimental desire to visit all the places that had been important to me in the past. ?I?ll show you the house where we lived when my folks were on the Navajo Reservation,? I told Lea as we drove toward Window Rock.

?My friend?s father had a motorcycle and he used to double us up on the back and ride us in and out of the wash. We held onto each other for dear life screaming over the rocks and dirt, chasing horned toads back into their holes. Joel and I would go down there and catch tadpoles in the summer. I?ll have to show you the wash.?

Lea and I drove down Kit Carson Drive past where my little school should have been and around the corner into town. I recognized the hill behind the school and remembered the bullies and standing on my tip-toes to reach the aluminum urinals. But neither bullies, nor urinals, nor preschool was anywhere to be seen. We turned the corner passing the old, abandoned hospital where my Dad used to work. Grass was growing through cracks in the parking lot.

Perspective

If memory served me, our house had been on the other side of town and looked out on a big triangular field. The field was immense. Its far border disappeared into the hinterlands where Indians lived and where birthday bikes disappeared. When I was a little boy, some one stole my new brown bike, the one I rode around the block and crashed into the fence after Dad got me going. It had white plastic hand grips and a shiny brown banana seat and one morning it was gone. I had stood looking across that field for a long time. The wild grass was tall and I could hardly see the houses on the other side let alone my new bike. It was a big field.

We lifted over a speed bump and started into the residential streets. ?We?ll drive all the way through town until we get to a big triangular field,? I told Lea. But even as we inched past the browning lawns, I began to have my doubts. I remembered the streets being further apart. Already now, and far too quickly, our road emptied out onto a small, triangular park filled with knee-high grass. I circled the field twice to let the dimensions sink in then drove to the far corner ? the hinterlands ? to look back at my old home only a stone?s throw away.

No doubt about it, the bike was long gone.