Susan Senator

Tonight Nat referred to The House as “home.”  It stuck in my throat like a piece of dry steak; there’s nothing that will make that thing go down once it’s passed your teeth.  But I kept trying.  After he said that, I inserted the words, “The House,” and “tomorrow- when-you-come-home” several times in the conversation, because I am that petty.  So now he thinks of there as home.  And so what are we, chop liver?

I wonder what Nat thinks of this place, his childhood home.  What are his memories like?  Does he get shots of scenes shown incongruously with others from his past and present, like I do?  Does he suddenly see our previous home, his nursery blue walls with the Laura Ashley border, when he’s looking at the walls of The House?  Are words tied into the images, or are words too difficult, even in thought and memory?

When did I stop thinking of where I grew up in Connecticut as “home?”  Was it when I went to college, or when I got married?  Now when a childhood memory flashes before my inner eyes, it feels odd, like “did that really happen?”  Today, for example, when I posted a shot of a rabbit in my garden (see below) on my Facebook page, I was thinking of Dad.  Dad loves rabbits, identifies with them, defends their garden-destroying ways.  I love them, too, but I love sparring with Dad even more.  Dad reads Watership Down every May, for his birthday.  He knows the language of the rabbits intricately, and the way they thought as they made their journey to their new home.  He discusses the qualities of Hazel’s reluctant leadership, the growth of BigWig, the belligerence of Woundwort; he sees how each character has his use and purpose to the rest of the group in the warren.

When Laura and I were little, we played a game called “rabbits,” with Dad.  We would be crouched around the living room floor, pretending to eat lemon leaves and lettuce leaves, but eventually, inevitably, Mr. MacGregor (Dad) would show up and try to catch us.  He’d call for help from Mrs. MacGregor (Mom), but she seldom helped him.  That would have made it really an unfair match of them against us.  Mom would call things out from the kitchen or wherever, but Dad was pretty much on his own.  This was our game.  Sometimes instead of being Mr MacGregor, he would be The Trap.  He would lie on his back on the blue tiled foyer that was next to the blue living room carpet where our garden was.  Every so often he would raise a robotic arm or leg with a “chk-chk-chk” mechanical noise, because after all, he was a machine. I can see it and hear it as if it were yesterday, and yet I also see how strange this whole scenario seems.

Dad perpetuates our memories and our childhood by talking about the rabbits and The Trap every now and then.  He has an amazing memory, so he dredges up jokes and games from forty + years ago, so that we remember them as if they just happened.  And yet when I really think about them, it feels like they couldn’t possibly have happened to me.

So what does Nat remember?  When I try to quiz him, like fill-in-the-blank, from a favorite childhood book, he looks at me blankly.  It could be that he doesn’t remember; it could be that he doesn’t want me to do that.  After all, Max and Ben only barely tolerate my frequent dipping back to when they were little.  Maybe Nat feels the same?  It is so hard to know what he feels, what he thinks about.  I know that it is that way with the other two as well, but they still communicate so much more with their expressions.  It’s like I keep grasping at them as they were, and sometimes they let me catch them and they indulge me in the memory.  Nat doesn’t.  He doesn’t even think of this as “home.”  I guess he has made his way to the new warren and is very happy with his place in the group there.  And I’m supposed to be Mrs. MacGregor and not interfere.