remember, dad, who we are?

storytime in the land of milk and bee spit

I don't remember what happened that night, but the next morning? Clear as day.

We were driving, Wilder and I.

He was three and I was me, on our way to the local grocer which we lovingly call Harry Titty.

“Remember,” I heard him say, from the back seat, “when I was scared in bed last night?”

"Yea," I said. “You were crying so I came in.”

"i was scared there was a ghost so – "

" – so I laid down next to you. And remember what we saw?”

“It was just the fan moving around and around," he said, unsure.

"Well, we THOUGHT it looked like a ghost but it was just the fan!!" I said.

“It wasn’t a GHOST, it was a FAN!!” He screamed, confidence building.

And so we went, back and forth through the cereal aisle, telling and retelling the story, all the way home, adding details (the night light made the shadows!), for the rest of the day and into bedtime that night, shaping the wet clay of memory into sculpted lore. Gospel. Truth.

So began our favorite pastime, literally: telling stories about things that just happened.

back in my day the ussr

"Do you remember it?" is the first question I get after telling people that I moved from Ukraine to the US when I was seven.

Weirdly, I don't.

I don't remember "it" - where we lived or what I'd do most days or how it felt to walk down the street, but I do have some stories. A handful. The greatest hits:

Sticking my finger into an exposed electrical socket when I was three.

Getting a huge splinter in my little toe when I was four.

And of course the granddaddy of them all: the time I got my head stuck in a balcony when I was five.

The whole thing plays back in my mind like a grainy 16mm film – fighting with my grandma, storming out onto the porch overlooking her apartment building's courtyard, sticking my head in between the cold, iron-wrought bars, and - what’s this? - my head getting stuck in there.

I remember everyone looking up at me and laughing, not so much with judgement but…awe? Concern? Fascination. My parents showing up and trying to butter my neck free until finally the fire dept guys showed up and sawed off the metal bar next to my neck to free me.

But is that right? Did grandma Nona’ place really have a courtyard where everyone could see me? Does it matter?

For the writer Joan Didion, “...the point of…keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking.”

For Didion, the point is something more like capturing “how it felt to me,” truth be damned.

Which makes sense when it’s you and your notebook. But what about when it’s you and someone else? How do we, together, decide “how it felt to us?”

the playground and the bees

All Wilder and I do now is run things back, replay the tape, rebuild the past into a story we’ll carry forth into tomorrow.

Like a few days ago, at the playground near our house, in the early morning sun, while I was taking a break from helping Emma June fill her water bottle so she could then side-waddle to a very specific spot under the covered concession stand and spill it all over herself, I heard Wilder say "dada look."

Pointing up at the roof of the stand, he’d found a very tiny beehive, the size of a golf ball, each hex thingy empty, save for one filled white.

We looked for bees but couldn't find any, so I took a photo with my phone and zoomed way in and yes, there did appear to be some wings there, but they weren't moving. "They must be sleeping," I told him, omitting the other thing they could be even though dead bugs have been a fascination of his since forever. Dead bees in particular, back when he could barely talk. "Bee died," he'd say, back then.

Not that day though. That day he said, "did you know that bees poop out honey?"

I didn't and told him as such, realizing I actually had no clue how bees made honey.

"No, bees do not poop out honey," Google says, providing a video source for backup, which I queue up right away, kneeling down so Wilder can see too.

"Honey is nectar that was drunk by bees, regurgitated and given to other bees who repeatedly spit up the nectar while adding enzymes."

"The bees spit it back and forth between each other??" he asks.

"Like one spits it out," I add, “and the other one swallows it, and then -”

“BLEEH,” he fake vomits, convincingly.

I think immediately of the genius who rebranded 'bee spit' into 'honey.' No way bee spit would have ever made it this far. Honey on the other hand, rules the world, as made clear with the Bible II’s phrase 'in the land of milk and honey.' Imagine if that was 'the land of milk and bee spit.' No one would go there.

"Ok so,” Wilder starts, his go-to for explaining something, though I can’t hear him over the five alarm screeches from the water fountain.

To no one's surprise, EJ has spilled more water and needs help. While refilling her water bottle, again, I hear Wilder say "hi" the way he does to everyone who walks by, the little mayor of this Asheville park.

Hi, a woman named Anne in her early 60s in capris and a muted pink shirt thing says back.

"We found a beehive," he tells her.

"Oh wow," she says, genuinely interested.

"Wanna see it?"

"If it isn't too far..."

"It's right here."

He shows her and they talk about our beach trip and "his baby" (EJ) and this little neighborhood she's lived in for 25 years.

They talk for a good ten minutes before she says "I'm going to keep walking before it gets too hot."

"Okay," he said, and talks to her for another ten.

On the swings, a minute after she leaves, he says to me "I can't believe I talked with that lady for so long."

"Yeah, I think she really liked talking to you."

"She's my friend for a little while."

"She said she lives around here so you'll probably see her again."

"We were really talking a lot"

"Look here she comes again on the path"

She waves.

"It's not too hot yet," he screams, "and it's going to rain soon."

She nods like she's really taking the info in, not dismissing him, treating him like an equal.

"I was a teacher for twenty five years," she'd told me back beneath the beehive, "and I miss talking to kids."

update re: the fan / ghost situation

I brought up the ghost/fan story the other day, driving, this time with the whole family, again to Hairy T, and asked Wilder if he remembered.

"Yea," he said, which could mean either yes or no or something else entirely. "The fan was a ghost."

"No, we realized the ghost was just a fan," I tried reminding him.

"No it was a real little tiny ghost. A lot of little ghosts. They were real. For real they were real."

"Right," I said. I guess they were, for now.

Stories, like memories and ghosts, don’t ever stay put.

They mold and bend and contort themselves to fit the truth of the present much more than the past. Like in this essay, there were several times I wrote things that were true in the Didion sense, true to me, but were they actually?

Did I really say the bees were “sleeping”?

Were we really driving to Hairy Titty when I first brought up the ghost fan?

And what about my grandma’s place in Ukraine - did it really have a courtyard?

Or did that I add that detail when, in middle school, I made a flash animation video about the incident to show my friends.

My first comedy video.

I remember using a stock image of a crowd pointing up at a stick-drawn figure of a little boy with his head in the balcony.

Was there really a crowd? Or was it all a reflection of how I must have felt at age 12, being seen and not liking it but also loving it, needing it, no matter the cost?

Does any of that matter? I don’t think so.

Then why share it?

Because my fear about whether it matters - that itself matters.

And it is by sharing that fear that helps us make sense of the ghosts all around us, realizing they’re nothing more than spinning fans even and especially if they are, in fact, actually ghosts after all.

—

"Of course we end up," David Foster Wallace said, "becoming ourselves."

"We tell ourselves stories to live," Joan Didion once said.

We tell ourselves stories to become ourselves.

Not once, but again and again, remembering the past, time traveling forwards, towards and into ourselves. Remember, we say to each other with all the details we can muster, remember who we are becoming?

Remember, dad, who we are?

—

Wilder and I scooter home from the playground and find Lauren in the backyard. We pepper her with our latest tale of intrigue.

Wilder starts, "I made a new friend and -"

“ - Miss Anne,” I continue, the two of us both giddy kids now, “who’s lived in the -”

"I showed her a beehive!"

"And we learned that bees don’t actually -”

“ - poop out honey but they -”

“SPIT it OUT!” we say, in unison but slightly off, like an echo of the past reverberating off the walls and into the present.

Because that's how an event becomes a memory. Story, told again and again, spit out and consumed and spit out again, sweeter and more full of the good stuff every time, not exactly what happened, but something better, sweet as honey.

---

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comments

1. What’s your family’s go-to story that you tell and retell all the time?

2. Any childhood memories that maybe or definitely did not happen?

3. did you know about bee spit?

5. hi

6. how are you? what’s somethin that’s been rattling around in your brain - idea, fear, theory - that might feel nice to get out there into the world?