When Laura and I were little, we played a game called “rabbits,” with Dad.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He’d call for help from Mrs. MacGregor (Mom), but she seldom helped him.\u00a0 That would have made it really an unfair match of them against us.\u00a0 Mom would call things out from the kitchen or wherever, but Dad was pretty much on his own.\u00a0 This was our game.\u00a0 Sometimes instead of being Mr MacGregor, he would be The Trap.\u00a0 He would lie on his back on the blue tiled foyer that was next to the blue living room carpet where our garden was.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Dad perpetuates our memories and our childhood by talking about the rabbits and The Trap every now and then.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And yet when I really think about them, it feels like they couldn’t possibly have happened to me.<\/p>\n
So what does Nat remember?\u00a0 When I try to quiz him, like fill-in-the-blank, from a favorite childhood book, he looks at me blankly.\u00a0 It could be that he doesn’t remember; it could be that he doesn’t want me to do that.\u00a0 After all, Max and Ben only barely tolerate my frequent dipping back to when they were little.\u00a0 Maybe Nat feels the same?\u00a0 It is so hard to know what he feels, what he thinks about.\u00a0 I know that it is that way with the other two as well, but they still communicate so much more with their expressions.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Nat doesn’t.\u00a0 He doesn’t even think of this as “home.”\u00a0 I guess he has made his way to the new warren and is very happy with his place in the group there.\u00a0 And I’m supposed to be Mrs. MacGregor and not interfere.<\/p>\n
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