  The farther back I go in my memory, the less significant and ordered the memories are. When I think about it, I realize that I’ve forgotten MOST of what’s happened over the course of my life and I guess it’s like that for everyone. The minute something is over, we start to forget no matter what it is. Even if we can hold on to most of it, we can’t seem to keep it totally. The more significant an event is to us, the more likely we are to remember it but even those only linger as shadows. Few of those precious moments hang in our heads for long. It’s almost like we’re anxious to get rid of them… or they’re anxious to leave. Memory does that. It evaporates like smoke through our fingers and, eventually, it’s not even memory any more. Yet it still affects us, whatever the happening was, and sometimes that’s what makes forgetting the hardest. We’re left with why’s and no means to seek out the answer. Maybe that’s why I’m writing – to salvage what’s still there before it blurs behind warped glass.
I think I still remember what’s important, though, and that’s what counts. God forbid I should ever be able to remember everything – every blessed moment of laughter and heartache. My first memory is of a green bathtub that I had when I was 2 or 3. I know that I thought of it as a boat and that I was bathed in it by my mother who, then, was an angel – the kind without the flaming sword. She sang like an angel as well, and that’s my next earliest memory – my mother singing to the radio. I guess it doesn’t matter what I thought of her singing. She was my mother and when she sang I felt filled up by her voice. When I was a little older, I’d stand outside of the bathroom when she was showering and listen to her sing.
I still do that sometimes though I don’t think she knows. Until recently I would have gladly exchanged that memory for something more dramatic – a story that was more of an obvious microcosm of my life. Maybe the first time I touched a piano keyboard – I ended up writing a song. My first word or my first tooth, hell, ANY first would have done fine. But I only had this… my mother as an angel and me, going dirty to clean, in my unbreakable plastic boat.
It’s funny how something as mundane as a plastic tub can come to be so significant. It was the first thing in my life that my brain decided to tuck away for safe keeping. I liked thinking about my mother that way – as an angel. Gigantic feathery wings, brilliantly white robes giving off impossibly bright light, a gently bent smile, warm and infinite eyes, forever warm, never angry, never upset, and always watching. She was like that in my reality at that age. I loved her then more honestly than I have ever loved anyone or anything since. It was beautiful. Now years have passed between us, complicating everything we’ve touched and I often wonder how much of that love is still there. 23 years of growing up have put a sizable gap between the boy in the tub and me. Bitter years of fighting, misunderstanding, confusion, and such have put me and mom on opposite ends of the room many times. There seems to be so much to disagree and tussle over these days. Life has a way of doing that sometimes. We’ve faced off on so many issues now that it seems that we can only love each other deep down. And we never talk about it.
I can’t honestly remember the last time I told my mother that I loved her. Last night, as I was writing this, my mother called for me... yelled for me, really. As always, I immediately got defensive. Making my way upstairs, I decided to tell her about the memory of the tub and her. I told myself that I needed to confirm the story. If the kid in the tub still lives in me, he wonders, while I’m writing this, what had happened to the angel. I thought about all this as I went upstairs. My love for my mother had changed. No longer was it this simple chubby smile out of nowhere. I now have 23 years worth of reasons to love her. Yet there was something about the love that the kid had for that angel.
It hurt me that things had gotten to be the way that they were between my mom and I. By no means terrible but 23 years has a way of bleeding the innocence out of any relationship. I’d give anything to be that kid again. She had called me to help with groceries and while I handled them off to the fridge and cabinets, I told her about the memory of the tub.
A much simpler version than written here – just that I remembered the tub that was my “boat”. For a second, I thought I was going to hear “What are you talking about?” if anything at all and I suppose that would have been fine. Instead, she caught me off guard. “You remember that?”, she said and smiled. It was right then that I saw her – the angel – right there in front of me. I let her smile a minute longer before turning on my heels, groceries still in bags, and went back to the basement before my vision blurred and spilled over. Somewhere inside me, the kid in the tub still lives. I’m pretty sure of that now. Dexter Otis Green 
