Something special – part 1.
On the way back from Washington DC to Minneapolis, I stopped to visit my mother at her nursing home in Jacksonville. These trips always conjure many feelings and memories. One of my deeper observations as an adult child is the role we play in being the arbiters of family memories as our parents pass on and, in my mothers’ case, slip into the darkness of dementia that prevents either recall or the verbal recollection of memories. I walk past their last house and feel that I must be the one now who does the remembering of their lives. Almost as a task passed on to me in my parents’ absence.
But the visits always bring childhood memories to the fore; memories of being a child with my parents, my parents as doing parentlike things. One most special memory was jogged by a recent blog post over at Lisa Belkin’s New York Times blog, Motherlode, on parents going to great lengths to rescue a child’s love object, like a stuffed animal or lost pet.
I have actually two memories on this subject. Here, the good one.
When I was 9 years old our cat, Harvey, became lost. Only not lost in the usual sense of his not coming 
home or caught in a tree. He was lost in our house. We knew this because we could hear him meowing. Only we didn’t know where he was. This dilemma happened in the morning, I remember, because I was shooed off to school, assured that my parents would keep looking for the cat. My parents assumed that he was in the wall.
Really.
We had a hall closet that opened up to the rafters and they figured he climbed up, got caught in there then fell behind one of the walls. Before I left for the 3rd grade, I remember seeing my father dressed in his suit for work, pouding a hole in my closet wall. This was a big deal because my dad was NEVER late for work. And I’m sure he regretted creating work for himself by making a hole that would later need to be repaired.
When I returned from school, my mother sent me to my room to retrieve something from my bed, and there was Harvey. Sleeping quietly – alive and happy. I learned that in fact, Harvey WASN’T in the wall. He’d gotten inside a rather heavy, very old wooden box that my mother had used for her doll clothes and 
now held mine, and that the top of the box fell on top trapping him. Yet the thickness of the wood masked Harvey’s real location – effectively throwing his voice as though he was a feline ventriloquist.
My father as cat hero reappeared a few times more during my childhood. We moved from the east coast to the midwest and back again several times and on one of the moves the cat decided she’d just stay put. But my father the farmboy who’d probably seen the demise of many unplanned litters of farmcats in his time found the cat and single handedly drove the cat hundreds of miles to our new house.
Sure I would do the same thing. So would my husband. (he’s good at fixing drywall anyway). Sure we’re good parents that way. But when my dad saved my cat, found the family cat and brought it home to us, he did these things beyond what he wanted to do for himself; he did them for what it meant to us.
And when they can’t, they feel very sad.
But that’s for tomorrow.
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