Images

Anita and me at the Lower Tahquamenon Falls last year.

There are some images that stay with you for longer than you might expect.

I remember the day my oldest daughter, Amelia, was born as if it were yesterday. I remember her brown hair and the strawberry mark on the top of her head and my feeling of amazement that she had finally joined us, that she was here, that I was a dad. I felt vaguely stoned, like my feet weren’t firmly touching the hospital room floor. I remember the blood and cutting the umbilical cord – I was surprised that it required two snips – and feeling awed by my wife at the time, so proud and respectful and relieved that she and our new baby girl were okay. More than okay. Perfect.

Amelia will be 21 next month. We haven’t seen or talked with each other in months and months. (I don’t even know for sure how long our estrangement has gone on – it’s not something that I allow myself to think about too much.) Nothing can remove the image from my memory, though, of my newborn baby girl, all purple and brown and bloody and beautiful, back on the morning of February 26, 1991.

Another image I can’t shake is that of another little girl: the “Girl in the Red Coat” whom Oskar Schindler watches from high atop a hill as she walks almost methodically through the streets of the Kraków Ghetto during its violent liquidation by the homicidal Nazis in the 1993 movie, Schindler’s List. Schindler’s eyes, and ours, are drawn to the child because director Steven Spielberg made her coat a vivid red in the otherwise black-and-white film. I won’t reveal what happens after that in case you haven’t seen the film but it’s a powerful scene in a powerful movie that’s stayed with me for almost two decades.

Other images come to mind – older and newer:

• The look in Anita’s eyes as we said goodbye in the driveway and I got in the car and headed to Atlanta 25 days ago. She was holding Ben and Jerry, our Maltese puppies, so that I could say goodbye to them too. I could see pain and sadness and anger in her eyes. I could see these things. I’ll never forget it.

• The white dome of Michigan’s State Capitol Building the first time I saw it, lit up at night. I was driving from my home in metro Detroit to downtown Lansing, which I’d never visited, for one of newly-elected Governor Jim Blanchard’s inaugural balls in the first week of 1983 – this one at the Lansing Civic Center, which no longer exists – and when the illuminated dome first emerged from behind the other buildings that comprised the skyline, I was unjustifiably awed. (If I knew then what I know now about what happens and doesn’t happen in that building, my reaction would probably have been different.) 

• 
  Nikita, Bryant, Maya and Devina laughing and smiling and playing and just being the beautiful children that they are. There are too many of these images to recount here, of them playing on the giant water slide that we used to inflate in the backyard, and sledding with me down “Dead Man’s Hill” while Anita poured hot chocolate from a thermos, and riding on the ferry as we headed from New York’s Battery Park to Ellis Island to see the Statue of Liberty in real life for the first time, and cuddling with our new puppies in front of the fireplace, and Bryant competing in his first Pinewood Derby and Nikita slicing through the water at a Spartan Swim Club meet and Maya dancing to Nicki Minaj and Devina emerging from her kindergarten class as I waited to pick her up from Midway Elementary School...I could go on and on.

• Seeing the Upper Tahquamenon Falls in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for the first time, which the locals apparently call “Root Beer Falls” because of the water’s brown color (although I never heard anyone refer to them by that name). The water gets its dark color from the decay of vegetation; the upper falls are 200 feet wide and around 45 feet long. It’s loud – in the spring, 50,000 gallons of water fall into the Tahquamenon River per second – and powerful and breathtakingly beautiful.

• Meeting Bubba Clinton outside of a Democratic Leadership Council meeting in Southfield, Michigan, back in the spring of 1991 when his hair was still brown. He was the governor of Arkansas then; this was before he formally announced his presidential run so not everybody knew who he was. I was standing in the hotel hallway, waiting for the meeting to end, when he appeared in the doorway, walked right up to me and introduced himself with an outstretched hand and a smile. We chatted for about 120 seconds, just Bill and me, before other politicians and staffers descended upon us and he excused himself. Our paths crossed three or four times after that, actually – I used to be somebody – but I’ll always remember the first time I chatted alone with the big, charming guy who would become the 42nd President of the United States less than two years later.

• Watching my natural father struggle with a large tree branch that was determined to knock him out of the back of our canoe as we floated down a river in downtown Rochester, Michigan, in 1976, when I was 14. The branch won; to this day I remember feeling embarrassed because I shouted, “Daddy!” as he hit the water although I was much too old to use that term. Believe it or not, that’s one of just three memories I have of him.

• Speaking of water, having to abandon our campsite in the Manistee National Forest last Labor Day weekend because of sudden, torrential rain and taking refuge in a tavern in downtown Manistee. Soaked, cold, hungry and miserable, we watched the weather report on the television in the bar; upon hearing that the forecast called for more of the same, we agreed that returning home early was preferable to drowning in a dome tent.

Several other images and experiences are flooding my brain as I write this. My memory’s not great (I relied heavily on Anita to remind me of appointments, tasks and obligations) yet I’m able to recall a number of things as if they occurred yesterday – which, depending on the memory, is either a blessing or a curse.