The groundkeeper

Memories are often layered over a specific trigger. First big snow of the year, for example, brings me back to my mother walking me to school – or was it pre-school? – with snowy wind in my face blowing at such an exact angle that I must turn my head to take a breath. The next thing, when I was about 20, my college job was to be a groundkeeper at a preschool. When it started to snow, it meant a sleepless night for me. I had to wake up at 4, and go shovel the snow. First, I had to clear space for the morning truck to deliver food. Next were the sidewalks for parents to bring their children in. By the end of the winter, snow accumulates in piles on lawns, sometimes 10-12 feet high; every shovel of snow has to be thrown that high, in just the right motion, so it does not slide right back down. The work was hard by also strangely enjoyable; the smell of fresh snow, and sound of the shovel scraping the pavement. Dostoyevsky writes about snow shoveling in a mid-19th century Siberian penal colony in his The House of the Dead.

I also remember doing another shoveling gig at a liquor store, perhaps next winter. It was so cold one night, and the lighting was not good. I ended up removing a layer of asphalt from the pavement thinking it was ice. Asphalt becomes brittle, and easily broken by an ice pick. I thought I’d get in trouble with the management, only to discover next day the pit filled up with ice again, indistinguishable from asphalt.

Why do certain things stick in our memory forever, while an important conversation from just two weeks ago I cannot recall at all? Some of the memories are shored by emotion, some by repetition, but others are simply random. They make the patchy fabric our lives, which we spend a long time organizing, re-writing, and make coherent after the fact. The relentless snow of forgetting whites out everything, except for some islands of recognizable memories.