So where does memory reside? In the head or the heart, some old photo album or a favorite song? The house where you grew up or the place where you went to school?
And how is memory made? How can an event seem so vivid, so seminal for some of us, yet barely register with others who lived in the same moment?
In 1970 we were living on an Air Force base near a town so small that all but the most basic of services had to be provided at larger destinations more than an hour away.
My father had realized a childhood dream and bought a Buick, specifically a Buick Electra 225. It was beautiful, long, shiny and forest green, perfect except for the fact that the doctor who had owned it previously hadn't seen the need for air conditioning.
Since we frequently had to travel back to Oklahoma to bury another relative who dropped over from cigarette- and bacon-induced heart failure, air conditioning was a must, and the Buick dealership in Bay City was the only place to get it installed.
My brother was learning to drive, so it went without saying that he would go. But for some reason my father, who typically wouldn't include me on these trips, brought me along as well.
If he'd told me we were going to Cairo, it couldn't have been more of an adventure. And for a 10-year-old to be allowed into the presence of the two people in the world he most revered for an entire day was, for me at least, the stuff of dreams.
My father spent most of the drive coaching my brother through either imagined or self-created intricacies of Michigan's state highway system. I, in those pre-seat belt times, peered over the front seat, silent, my chin resting on the backs of my hands. One day I would be old enough. One day my father would tell me, "light on the brake there," or "always check your gauges." One day I would be in the company of men.
Installation would take most of the day, and so, without a car, our only recourse was a diner across the street and then a long afternoon on the front porch of the dealership. About mid-afternoon, my father got up from his folding chair, went over to the huge, humming horizontal refrigerator that served as the dealership's soft-drink dispenser and bought us all small, frosty bottles of Coca Cola he expertly popped open on the metal device anchored on the machine's side.
And then, in a move as exotic as the moment a snake charmer turns over his basket, my father reached into his pocket, pulled out a small package of peanuts and poured some, expertly, into his drink.
In years to come I would recognize this as a fairly common Oklahoma delicacy, but at the time it was either madness or divine inspiration. When he offered some to me and my brother, it could have been lye and I would have said yes, so dead set was I on not breaking the spell of that day.
It was delicious, the perfect mix of salty sweetness and acid-y burn, all with the fizz and the ice cold of that Coke. To the residents of the bustling metropolis of Bay City, we couldn't have looked more country if we'd been wearing overalls and waving at cars with out-of-state license plates. To me, we were kings, sharing a secret mere commoners would never understand, our future stretching out before us forever.
It wasn't, of course. The arbitrary cruelness of accident and unstoppable advance of disease have run their course and now I'm the only one left. I can't imagine either of them ever thought of that day again. But I'll never forget it.
This Sunday, I'll be thinking of my dad, a man who, against tremendous odds and with little or no training from his own family, was the kind of father I can only hope I have been and will be. And I'll recall how he made memories that will last a lifetime out of events so simple and so commonplace. I'll think of my brother, of the man he was well on his way to becoming, the father he might have been.
And I'll think of a hot afternoon and a man and his sons on a porch.
So where does memory live? I know memory lives in no single location. It comes from the oddest of places and is always with us, floating like the mist on a pond in the early morning, or the clouds in a hot summer sky.
Like peanuts in a bottle of Coke.
GARY SMITH IS A RECOVERING JOURNALIST LIVING IN ROGERS.
Commentary on 06/12/2014