The Boy In The Mirror

 

I remember being brought home from the hospital I was born in.

I remember the Kennedy assassination. I was seventeen months old.

People don't believe me when I say that, and I've stopped trying to convince them. But I have thousands of details from the first few years of my life, and most people have almost none, and for a long time I had no idea why.

Here's the only explanation I've ever had.

When I was five my parents took me to a drive-in in Concord, California to see The Jungle Book. Colonel Hathi has a line in it. An elephant never forgets.

I said it for days. I said it until everyone in the house was tired of hearing it.

And at some point my dad looked at me and said, but you won't. You're a kid. You'll forget all of this.

It horrified me.

I went into my parents' bedroom, stood in front of the mirror, and decided I wasn't going to.

Then I did something I still find strange. I stood there and went through them one at a time, out loud, deliberately. My first airplane ride. Seeing my baby brother for the first time. Disneyland. The Space Needle. The monorail in Seattle. My imaginary sheepdog. My first birthday cake.

I rehearsed my own life so it would stay.

Some of it I would have kept anyway, because the body keeps what frightens it.

My second airplane ride, when I was two, is as clear as this morning. Somewhere near Portland the pilot came on and had us rehearse a crash landing. We didn't stop in Portland. We went on to Seattle and came down on a foamed runway with fire trucks and ambulances all along it.

That one didn't need rehearsing. The more frightening a thing is, the more of it I have.

And one morning when I was not quite three. My brother had just thrown up on my mother. She'd taken her nightgown off and was holding him when the house started shaking and things came out of the cabinets. I was in a doorway holding one of her hands while she held him with the other.

My dad asked later if I'd heard the elephants on the roof.

April 29, 1965. A 6.5 between Seattle and Tacoma, at 8:28 in the morning. He wasn't home. He was a DJ and program director at KOL and he was on the air when it hit.

Somewhere in school I found the mechanism, though I didn't know that's what it was.

If I wrote it down, it was mine.

I never reread my notes. Not once. The writing was the encoding, and once it was on the page it was also in me. As a reporter I'd write down the first and last words of a soundbite I wanted, and then I could find it on the tape without looking, because I'd written it.

By the end of my time in television I was the video archive. Not officially. People would come to me and ask what year that fire was, or which bill it was, or whether we'd covered a trial before. Two decades of crime and disasters and legislation, all filed somewhere behind my eyes.

Now it's people.

I've sat with thousands of clients over the last twenty-some years. I told a woman a story last week that she'd told me two years ago, and she'd forgotten she'd told it. She'd forgotten the story. Watching her get it back was one of the better moments of my month.

My brother doesn't have most of our childhood. I do, and sometimes I give him pieces of it.

And I can still tell you the grill and fryer temperatures at McDonald's in 1977, and every step of the service sequence. Greet the customer, big smile. Take the order. Assemble the order. Take the payment. Thank them and ask them to come back.

Nobody has ever needed that from me. I have it anyway.

People ask whether it's a burden, holding all of it.

It isn't. It's the best thing I have. It's what made me useful in a newsroom and it's most of what makes me useful in a room with one person now. When somebody tells me who they are, it stays told.

I think about that kid at the mirror sometimes.

He was five years old and somebody told him he was going to lose everything he had, so he stood there and said it all back to himself to make it stick.

It worked.

An elephant never forgets.