I’m not sure I know what any of this means or if it means anything at all.

I am on vacation. I am back home – a home where I have not lived for decades. Still, it feels more like home than any other place I have ever lived. It’s in southwest Michigan, about 30 minutes from “The Big Lake” – Lake Michigan.

There are memories here. Some good. Some very bad. Many, many memories – I am sure. I am trying very hard to remember. For some reason – and my therapist has many – I have very, very little memory of my childhood. Many of the memories I still have stir up “icky” feelings. That’s the best way to describe them. Icky.

I am traveling with a dear friend. We grew up a block from each other, went to school together and graduated in the same class. He has an amazing memory and he remembers so many good times. Names of teachers I had long forgotten. Donut runs to the bakery. Make-up spots around the lake. Water skiing. Bonfires. Football games. Great stuff I DO remember.

“Oh my God, I had totally forgotten about that,” I say, over and over.

We hung out with friends last night and watched the moon rise over the lake and talked and talked of who married, divorced, moved away, stayed in town, had kids and illnesses. Who died, who is rich, who ended up in rehab or behind bars.

I remember now.

I drove by the house I grew up in this morning. We sold it six years ago after my parents died. They both had cancer. Dad went first, mom 16 months later. My dad was an alcoholic. Before we sold the house I cleaned out his bar, poured every drop of every bottle down the drain. I was alone in the house – six years sober myself. It felt good.

My parents owned the house for nearly 40 years. I tried to kill myself twice in that house. I wrote my first journals. I listed to The Who’s Quadrophenia, over and over, alone in the basement. I lied to my mom here about where I had been, who with and what we had done. I stole booze from my dad’s bar and watched my parents fight without words.

But there were good times, snuggled up by the fireplace with our dog. Ernie Harwell calling the plays of some ballgame as my dad listened on the back porch, with the crickets signing. A glass of wine beside him and the newspaper on his lap.

I read somewhere that the brains of people with depression cop to  negative memories. It’s like an instinct. When we remember, the first thing we remember is a bad memory – not a good one.

Do this long enough – for decades – and the good memories get buried so deep that you forget they are still there.

But they are.

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    Last reviewed: 16 Jul 2010