What's New Orleans?

As I waited with my six-year-old son in stalled traffic on the West Side Highway, at the end of a long day, we were both feeling baggard and hungry. My son was yeaming for a chocolate Easter egg. "The one you gave me when we were at Caroline's, with white inside, and then yellow inside that. I wish I had one now."

I was amazed that Nicholas could remember that Easter at Caroline's; he had been less than two. And why couldn't I remember buying that egg? There had been a time when I was seventeen or eighteen when I recorded every single thing I did in a diary. Nothing in my life, I resolved, would be lost.

Of course, things are different now. My adult life is crammed with errands and appointments and lists. I collapse into bed each night, so tired that I cannot stay awake long enough to review my day. And just as I fall with a thud into deep sleep, I am invariably haunted by the sense that I'm forgetting something.

"I wish I had some of the gumbo we tried last year in New Orleans," I replied as we inched along in traffic.

What's New Orleans?" Nicholas asked. Since he was born we have always taken Nicholas everywhere with us. He likes to strap himself into an airplane seat and study the map in the flight magazine. We have hoped that by exposing him to our modest travels we will widen his horizons, fill his world with vivid impressions of exotic landscapes and distinctive cities. Flannery O'Connor said something to the effect that all you needed to be a writer was to have been a child. So Nicholas would have a head start by being a child with fabulous memories.

"What's New Orleans!" I cried in shock. I told him it was incredible to me that he could forget the outlandish costumes, the bands playing Dixieland music in the streets, the steamboats on the Mississippi River. Nicholas's face looked blank. He could recall perfectly a chocolate he had eaten when he was nineteen months old, but he had completely missed three days of unforgettable pageantry just last year. I was especially surprised by this gap because Nicholas usually has an excellent memory. In middle age, mine is starting to slip: I cannot tell you one single thing that happened to me between the ages of twenty-six and twenty-nine, for example. But Nicholas has so few years to keep track of. "Was Daddy in New Orleans, too?" my son asked, eager to crack this mystery. "Yes," I said. "Remember when he took you to McDonalds and you got a peacock feather?"

"McDonalds!" said Nicholas with relief. "Now I remember! New Orleans! It's right next to Yonkers!"

We were right next to Yonkers ourselves by now, and my son, exhausted by this Herculean strain on his memory, fell asleep. Traffic was finally sailing along, and I began to consider that when Grandpa, in his nineties, lay on his deathbed, he suddenly began to remember things. Once he had told me that he could recall nothing before his sixteenth birthday. And that was no surprise. Grandpa's mother had died when he was a baby, and his childhood had been filled with long hours of hard work on a midwestern farm, unrelieved by maternal affection. Certainly no one had ever taken him to see Mardi Gras or the changing of the guard. Who wouldn't forget a childhood like that?

But now in his final days, a curtain seemed to open onto a floodlit stage busy with early drama--a button missing on a sailor suit, the smell of frying chicken at a church supper, snow so deep it covered the kitchen windows, a goldfish. "And I remember my mother," whispered Grandpa on the evening of his death. "You can't possibly remember her!" we claimed, "she died when you were only fourteen months old!" "But I do remember her. She was painting pictures on a lampshade. Her dress had a big white bow in the back...."

And so as I drove Nicholas home toward his dinner that night, I thought that perhaps the solitudes and silences of infancy and of old age have something in common. I turned on the car radio, hunting for some evening news. Instead, I heard a woman with a Texas accent singing "Where are you going, my little one, little one," a song that has always made me weepy. "Turn around and you're two, turn around and you're four," she sang sadly. I pulled into my driveway, and parked under the lilac bushes, thick and heavy with their perennial purple fragrance.

I looked over at my sleeping son, his fair shining head filled with a sweet disorder of super-soakers and Happy Meals and long summer evenings, all of it swirling in the half-understood dream of early childhood. I was still in the driver's seat, the engine off, the radio on. "Turn around and you're tiny; turn around and you're grown," the song continued. And I looked at my child, suddenly half-grown, and I could have sworn that it was just a few weeks ago, certainly no farther back than Christmas, that he was a brand new baby in an infant safety seat, his eyes and his tiny fists closed around the inscrutable slumber of not yet knowing things. And I tell you that I could not for my life comprehend how whole years had vanished in the space of mere weeks. And I turned around. For that brief moment, he was still six years old. And already he was starting to forget things.

When my husband came out on the porch to investigate why we were still sitting in the car, he found me clutching the steering wheel, choked up over that silly song. I was taking in the lilacs, trying to memorize them, trying to hold on tight to something I knew would have to be lost.

Peggy Ellsberg teaches at Barnard College.