My name is Montgomery A. Morris III. I come from a long line of Morrises – three
Morrises, out of a pathological character trait for repetition, have been
christened Montgomery .
All of us Morrises have lived the duration of our lives on
planet earth; all of us have been well-to-do travelling businessmen of one kind
or another; and yet all of us, including me, I now realise, and I am ashamed to
say, have been too cheap and lazy to make life here, there, hell anywhere, a
great deal better than it is, and too damn proud to acknowledge our failings.
Last week I had a sobering experience. I was on a business trip and happened to pass
by the town of my birth. You know, in
setting out, I hadn’t even entertained the idea I might travel anywhere near
where I grew up; my childhood seems to me another time and place, a time and
place the person I see in the mirror every morning perhaps didn’t even
experience for real, the child I never was, from where I can’t recall.
Anyhow, I was an hour ahead of schedule, and seeing the name
of my birth town on the road signs stirred in me a seldom felt nostalgia to
make a short detour. So I slipped off
the motorway at the next exit and joined a tailback heading into the centre.
I have two memories from my childhood, one perhaps too warm
and cosy to be true, the other perhaps too cruel and salient to be untrue. The first memory is of rolling around my
step-mother’s front lawn on a hot summer’s day, the sky eight-eighths blue,
with her Labrador puppy licking my face; the second is of being taken to the
refuse yard by my father, and there, in among a trough of discarded house-hold
appliances, from science ovens to vacuum cleaners, grammar phones to cordless
kettles, lay the bloodied remains of a dead kitty-cat. Someone had run it over, and had treated it
with the same sanctity as the unwanted and inanimate objects the kitty-cat was
surrounded with. This was the first, and
not the last occasion in life, I have hoped for a better world…somewhere else.
My birth place had unsurprisingly changed a lot in five
decades. New mauls and office buildings
had appeared like Lego blocks (how old are architects these days!?), a new
one-way system led conveniently toward the retail park, the telephone exchange
where my step-mother had worked was derelict - now a great, empty building with
a small plastic box in one dusty corner, relaying the telecommunications a
staff of fifty would once have relayed, or so I imagined. And the refuse yard had grown into a small
mountain, a slag heap looming precariously over the town.
For the past twenty-five years I have owned what has become
a fairly lucrative washing machine business.
We manufacture and sell washing machines for the home and have range of
industrial-sized washing machines for industrial laundries as well. I have a comfortable, spacious, four bedroom
apartment and a nice car, both as a result.
My wife is intelligent and beautiful, at least after a fashion, and my
kids went to decent schools. Beyond
this, I am at last convinced I have achieved very little else.
My washing machines keep people’s clothes cleaner than they
might otherwise be. My wife, since I am
often away, keeps our apartment neat and tidy.
My kids may make the most of their education and wind up putting some of
their knowledge back into society. My
guess is they won’t – we Morrises are typical of so many nuclear families of
today, we make copies of each other generation after generation.
It’s no surprise mankind very rarely learns from it’s own
history, and goes on repeating the same mistakes.
But back to my ad-hoc return to my birth town; I tried, of
course, to find my old house. In my
imagination it was a rather elegant red brick two-storey town house, with a
large veranda out front, and a lawn, and a neat gravel drive, and a
garage. My only (perhaps real) memory of
it, as I have said, is of my step-mother’s Labrador ’s
tongue on my (perhaps) rosy-red apple cheeks.
I didn’t find my old house, it may not exist any more. And without it, I suppose, my childhood means
nothing. And what of the child that grew to become the adult me? What is left?
What was there in the first place?
Amidst all of this rambling, what I really want to get
across is the singular importance of memory.
I realise I miss mine sorely. It
should be the basis on which I make good and or reasonable decisions, it should
be the basis on which I build on my day to day experience of living to the
extent I can develop enough to be aware of other people in other spaces over
and above the one I inhabit. My memory
should be an aide not just to me but to others too. It is integral to my intelligence.
However, it has become cluttered with things that don’t seem
of very much use for more than a nano-second - modern life leaves very little time for memories to develop and be understood - and except for the names and ages
of my kids, and my wife’s birthday (which I sometimes forget, my excuse being that we, my wife and I, live in a distracted world), in the internet
I have a memory pool for everything else.
How do you teach an old, scatter-brained dog like me new
tricks when there are no tricks that need to be mastered?
My memory is in danger of becoming largely redundant, sad to
say, and my usefulness to others is going with it – aside from helping people
keep their clothes clean, from staying away from any house-work to allow my
wife a purpose, and giving my kids the slim chance of not turning out like me,
Montgomery Morris II, and Montgomery Morris I before that.
It seems to me the question as to whether we can reverse the
slow demise of our planet - and give the casual inter-galactic observer the
impression that we humans don’t in fact hate
the place, and the other creatures that inhabit it - revolves
around what we can remember to do.
For whatever remains of my existence, and heavens I may not
have long, I shall try to remember to recycle my milk cartons; I shall try to
remember to say ‘hello’ to my neighbour, and if he should strike up a
conversation try to be interested; I shall try to stop and think every now
again of my far-flung friends and relatives, send them a postcard, or drop them
a line; I shall try and remember to stay away from the internet, try to
reimburse my memory bank on my own – perhaps I shall read some more; I shall
try to make time to write down my sum experience for my kids, largely what no
to do, so that they have an advantage in the memory stakes, so that they
wise-up; I shall try to remember to
consider my wife’s beauty and intelligence more often and more seriously; I
shall try to use the profits from my washing machine business for something
more than keeping people’s clothes clean; next time I pass by my birth town, I
will try to have recalled where my childhood took place, my old house, and whether there was
a large veranda, a neat gravel drive, a garage,
a lawn and a Labrador puppy.
And I will also retain the memory of that kitty-kat at the
refuse yard.
No comments:
Post a Comment