Things I Took from the Men in my Life

         Being a lifelong patron of a wide array of musical genres, my grandfather has spent years collecting records and record sleeves. He finds them abandoned in thrift stores and used music shops, and he takes them home and cares for them. He places them in boxes, peruses them, dusts them, catalogs them. Today his records number above ten thousand, and he has the accompanying sleeves for nearly a third.
         I cannot explain why I used to have a hula girl adhesived to my dashboard, or why I have saved every pretty-looking-but-probably-not-rare-or-valuable-in-any-way rock for the rock collection I started when I was nine or so. (I still have this collection.) I can’t explain why I still have a small rubber duck with a bandanna and a cowboy hat.
         That rubber duck is absolutely useless. It was in a box that my father had found on one of his miniature semi-suburban expeditions. (It’s a practice called geocaching; people hide little boxes and treasures and then put out the coordinates on the Internet, and people like my Dad, fanciful modern-day Tom Sawyers, get after it with tennis shoes and a handheld GPS.) I went with him and found this little cowboy duck; I had to take him home with me. Proper geocacheing etiquette is to leave something behind if you take something with you; I wrote up a little poem and took cowboy duck with me. The poor guy can’t even float; his little rubber cowboy hat makes him top heavy.
         Even so, I keep him on a shelf in my room. He is only one of the many kitschy artifacts that reside with me.
         Many of us keep our childhood sports medals years after the glory has faded away. We keep them in drawers and never look at them, but cannot bear to throw them in with the garbage. We are so absorbed in keeping our memories alive that we think incarnating them with objects will keep them from fading away in our minds. Often times, it works.
         My first love bought me a small red teddy bear for Valentine’s Day the year I turned fourteen. The thing was plush and soft, a vibrant shade of crimson; I adored him from the moment he handed him to me. I put him on a shelf in my bedroom.
         He had company. There was a stuffed puppy dog there, a Christmas gift from another old boyfriend, as well. In fact, there were several animals of the cute, fluffy, and stuffed persuasion all taking up residence as pathetic trophies of failed relationships.
         Years later, I have a nervous breakdown after a bad breakup. When I’m stressed, I purge.
         I start throwing things away. I give away three trash bags full of things that I have kept over the years for no good reason. I happen to glance up onto my shelf.
         I think the animals can sense what is coming. They seem to cower. I revel in this fear, for I am angry.
         I climb up onto my desk and reach onto the shelf. I ruthlessly toss them, one by one, into one of the trash bags that will soon be on its way to the Goodwill. My hand settles on a small swath of scarlet synthetic fur.
         I pause. Hold him for a minute, turn him over in my hands a little. I run my fingers down his little red bear cheek. He is the last of them. I get down off the desk.
         I do not have a reason to keep him, I know. I try to remind myself that I did not love the bear, I loved the boy who gave it to me. For a second, I hold the thing to my chest and think. I do not have many pictures or notes or cards. I am getting rid of the only connection to my first love.
Looking at that bear brings me backward.
         God, we were so young. It is a strange thing to remember being young and in love. The memory feels antique.
         I met him at a church function. He was tall for his age, and blonde; my thirteen-year-old self loved him almost as soon as I laid eyes on him, the two of us swinging back and forth on the church playground swing set like clock pendulums. Years later he would push me on that swing; he would kiss me for the first time in a tiny abandoned chapel at church camp. He would pick a few of the colorful weeds and pathetic-looking flowers from the garden and present them to me on Easter Sunday.
         Going to church never really had much to do with prayer for me. Oh, my little child-self was twitterpated.
         Even after we broke up, we were practically best friends. He still took me to the senior prom. My parents let us borrow their car, a beautiful black Mustang convertible, which we drove with the top down all night after the prom was over, him without his jacket—in just that vest and tie, with his sleeves rolled up, a tall drink of water looking all cute. I was in that long silver dress that made me feel like a princess; when I saw that another girl at the prom was wearing the same dress, he told me that I looked better and I didn’t care about her. I felt like I had been sprinkled with a dust of diamonds that night with my hair all up in curls and my gloves that came up to my elbows and after the prom we drove around the city looking for a place that was open where we could eat some pie, my heels on the floor and my feet up on the dash, the air fragrant with exhaust and pot and the lovely smell of tacos from Mexican food trailers. That whole night belongs to him in my heart, and that’s why I can throw that bear away.
I realize that I do have a connection left; it is the thin but unbreakable thread of memory. I realize that although someday I will love someone else, and I may forget this boy’s name and his face and I will even forget this bear, I will never forget the feeling of being tongue-kissed for the first time; I won’t forget him holding my hand, him being the source of so many firsts. So I look into a place of courage, wherever that may be, and I gently lay the little red bear in the bag, in a place of respect atop the others.
My grandfather used to make dream catchers. They are little pieces of wood, bent into a circle and fastened into place with cowhide; little webs of horsehair are woven into the center with beads and feathers. According to legend, the dream catcher hangs above you while you sleep and catches your dreams; the good ones move to the center and travel down through the feathers and back into the mind of the dreamer, while the bad ones become trapped in the web and eventually perish with the light of the rising sun.
         I rarely sleep without one nearby. They sit in the window, beads glinting in the sun, turning as though in a slow dance. I don’t know whether I actually keep them there because of the legend that accompanies them; I would rather believe that I keep them there because they let me keep a piece of my grandfather with me.
         Like my Dad, Grandpa Kent always loved to go on adventures. One year we visited home in Billings, Montana and we made plans to visit the Billings Gun Club. The day we planned on going, it began to snow. My brother and I wanted to stay home where it was warm, but my Dad, my Uncle Keith, and Grandpa Kent piled us into the car and forged onward. They dragged us out to the gun club and put rifles in our hands with which to shoot little iron targets as snow piled up around our poorly clad ankles. I nearly froze my fingers off, but I won’t forget it.
When we went to Montana, We’d take regular fishing trips. We’d go to this quiet spot where the bank reached far out almost to the middle. I liked to play in the water, throw stones into the slowly churning stream. My grandpa would alternate between fishing and reading. I would occasionally stop over to chat with him.
         “Hey, beautiful,” he’d say. Then he would cough.
         We would spend a few hours out there, being lazy, ankle-deep in the cold river, before we’d pack up and head homeward.
         Grandpa Kent always said that he would love to go on a fishing excursion with just my Dad; he never got to spend time alone with his son-in-law and friend because others always wanted to tag along. Even when my siblings and I respected those boundaries one summer, my Aunt insisted that her husband and son be allowed to go. Family politics prevented them from being able to disagree. So the four of them went on their fishing trip that year even though that was never how my grandfather wanted it to be.
         When they all made it to the spot that they would be fishing, three of them settled down to fish for the day. Grandpa Kent sat down and watched; usually he read a book. My Dad said later he found this strange.
         It wasn’t until the end of the day, when Dad was driving everyone home and unpacking fishing equipment person by person, that he came across Grandpa Kent’s fishing pole, handmade by one of his truest friends, snapped clean in half and completely unusable. It had suffered grievous injury on the way to the river and he had never said a single word.
         Daddy had no idea that this had happened, and no one had thought to ask.
         Fishing was one of his favorite pastimes and my father was one of his closest friends, like a son to him. Every time we think on that day, we can’t help but imagine how sad he must have been, how disappointed. He had never once been granted the one thing he wanted from us, and the one fishing trip that sucked for him the most was the last one he would ever have. My dad cried.
When my grandpa died, his wife offered my dad that fishing pole as a way to remember him. He refused.
         My grandpa was a smoker from the age of twelve. He had three heart attacks in his life, and the third one killed him on a Saturday morning in October last year.
I sat in his chair, a big, squeaky, spinning office chair. I leaned back and examined the contents of his office. Suspense thriller novels lined a bookshelf against the far wall. Shelves ran along the top border of the room, showcasing various family “heirlooms”, really just stuff that was never sold at garage sales because of the obsessive packrat behavior of the person to whom they belonged. The desk was stuffed with old papers, computer manuals, and electrical wires. There were a bunch of those notepads garnished with the names of realtors and community colleges. I opened the middle drawer and found probably dozens of matchbooks picked up from motels. I took one out.
         It had five matches left in it; the rest had been torn out, used to light a dozen or so cigarettes. It had the “Yodeler Motel” printed on the front in decorative red letters. I put it in my pocket. No one would miss it.
I had something to represent the man who threw his will away when he realized he had nothing he could give me.
         There was just so much stuff on this desk—I felt like I could lose what I had left of him amidst all of this stuff. Or that someone could lose me in it, that someone could forget that I missed him and grieved for him, could forget just how much I adored him.
         I took a sheet of paper off of one of those stupid notepads and started writing to him, telling him that I love him and that I hate him for not waiting until I could say goodbye to die. I told him that when I sat in his chair and curled up in a ball and cried in my folded arms, that I could almost feel him. I was so close to feeling him.
         As he used to say, “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.”
         I couldn’t feel him.
         So I folded up that note and left it in that middle drawer of his, surrounded by those matchbooks. Now there was a piece of me there, a physical reminder that I had been there so that neither he nor anyone who happened to sift through his desk would ever forget that I was there and that I missed him. It is interesting, this obsession that people have about associating memories with physical things, as though they are terrified of being forgotten. But I was, and I am.
         It wasn’t just the matchbook. I had that piece of him. I had another part of him hanging in my window, slowly turning, sifting through my dreams and giving me back only the good ones. I had the part of him that was a rough cigarette kiss on my forehead. I had the part of him that was the cold river around my ankles.
         As I reflect on these things I realize that it is okay for me to have a retarded rubber duck, a dream catcher, a matchbook, or a scarlet Valentine’s bear if they make me think warmly on my Dad, my first love, my Grandpa. It is okay that I leave a note so my dead grandfather will remember me. It is fine to keep material things close to me as long as I keep my dad’s adventure closer to my spirit, my first kiss closer to my mind, and my grandpa’s cold river and bristly smoke kisses closer to my heart.