Eewen Chew
12th September 2016
Int Seminar 1: Memory
Emily Raabe
The Street of My Childhood
The street of my childhood started with a school. It let out at precisely two o’clock everyday with the shrill ringing of its bell, shortly accompanied by the growing roar of students trickling out to make their way home. Opposite the school was a small road that went slightly uphill. On the corner of this road, sat my grandparent’s house with its black iron wrought gates and cobblestone walls and its row of pink hydrangeas – the place where I spent the majority of my childhood years. The road continues to a junction where going straight leads you to more rows of houses, each identical to each other. However, if you were to turn right, you would find a big park with a basketball court and a playground, albeit slightly worn down by the countless children that have played there.
These are the facts of my childhood – solid and unchangeable – such that even if my memory were to fail me, I still would not be able to forget these places. In a way, it forms the very platform in which my childhood took place and yet, merely telling you about these places do not fully encapsulate what my childhood was. These places, while important, merely serve as a bridge between my present and past. They cannot speak for themselves of the memories that I created there.
In the end, all these places merely form the concrete foundation or rather, the stage that my memories rest on. After all, how can merely describing the playground – even in detail – ever explain the way my grandfather took me there every other day at a child’s whim to push me on the swings and have imaginary pirate sword battles with sticks? I can recall how my grandparents’ house looks like with near perfect clarity, and yet telling you about its shape and structure would never explain the way my brother and I played and explored in every nook and cranny of that house for the twelve years that we were in Malaysia, nor would it tell you about the childish, naïve adventures that we imagined and created for ourselves.
The memories make the place. The lawn outside my grandparents’ house will remain merely a lawn if I were to forget the way my brother and I used to race down it in our small electric cars, pretending to be racecar drivers on a track. Or the way that the brightly coloured fish in the fishpond with a small waterfall would gather at the surface of the water as you peered down at them, lapping at the water as if begging for food. Or even the way that the wind chimes that my grandfather had put up years before I was even a thought in my parents’ minds would gently tinkle as the afternoon breeze blew in, creating a soft melody that echoed throughout the house.
Even now as I recall these memories, I am filled with a rush of warmth. The way the grass prickled under my bare feet as I ran and jumped across the field; the butterfly that I accidentally caught and killed that one fateful afternoon. The thought of the white swing on the porch that I used to sit on with my grandfather, always wanting to go faster and faster to his absolute chagrin, and the smell of lunch wafting through the air from the back where my grandmother cooked all transports my mind back to being a child again.
The more I remember the quicker the memories come. I see flashes now: the rumble of my parent’s car as they pick us up after work, the chicken that we reared in the backyard, the brick wall, the sandbox, the fish food in the cupboard, the bats in the alcove, the green beans that my brother and I grew, the way we pretended to be Power Rangers, the dark green car, the television permanently tuned to Disney Channel or Cartoon Network and the blanket forts we used to make. The recollections ebb and flow, giving me a span of memories that form a picture of my childhood.
Inadvertently, the memories slow down. It stops. There’s more there, I know. If I were to dig into the recesses of my mind I could definitely find more memories of my childhood and yet, as I’ve learnt, it becomes harder and harder the further I travel away from those years.
I dread to think that there might come a day where only but a handful of memories truly remain with me. Where the places I grew up become a little bit colder and a little bit emptier, leaving me grasping at the straws for a memory I once knew like the fading wisps of a dream. Where only the strongest memories remain, and the less significant ones fade into oblivion, leaving nothing more than a multitude of faint, bittersweet images that always hint towards something more, but never quite able to fully realize it.
It’s night now. My grandmother solitarily waves goodbye from the porch as my parents back their car out of the driveway. The black iron gates open, they close. We drive. We pass the rows of identical houses, the playground illuminated only by the muted glow of streetlamps, and the school which is almost hauntingly silent. The car moves faster as we turn into the main road – faster and faster we go. I see the scenery zoom by in a blur, too fast for me to make out. On a whim, I look back to try and catch a last glimpse of the street of my childhood but as I look, I see that the street has already faded into the background of the dimly lit night leaving me unable to see what was once there. It is far too late now, I quickly realize. The street is gone, and only the faint glow of distant lights serve as a reminder of what once was.