“Rainbow Fish,” 2018, by me
I just realized I forgot to sign up my daughter for aerial silks classes. This isn’t something I forgot from, like, last week…it’s something I’ve forgotten since she was five. Every once in awhile she’s reminded me, but first we were moving and then there was Covid and then there was more moving and then it felt too expensive and then I couldn’t find a time that worked and then we changed our custody schedule around and it fell off my radar, and…
Now I am sitting here, admittedly hormonal but still practically in tears, feeling like I have failed her, because she doesn’t really do a sport and she could have been all these years and it’s not that it’s too late, I know that – it’s that it feels like I blink and find that entire worlds of opportunity have passed us by. I think of all the places I want to go with my children, then I start counting up the cost of plane tickets and hotels and dividing by my bank account then dividing by the number of spring and summer breaks we have left, and —
Blink —
There are no more spring and summer breaks for me to help them fill (for them to want me help them fill); they’ll fill them as they wish. I missed taking those classes with my daughter during years when she would have loved to do that with me, and I know that time is finite. Usually I can accept this as an necessarily melancholy fact of life, but sometimes the panic catches me, and I’m off.
I did do it once, though. Aerial silks with my daughter, when she was five – that’s how she knew what it was. The studio I went to back in the day didn’t do kids’ classes, but once in awhile she’d come along with me sat in the corner watching while I flipped around on the silks. One day there was nobody else there, so my instructor called her over, helped her wrap up her feet. She took a step up into the silks and swung a little, grinning. Nothing much; just a minute that I think of sometimes.
You see how deep a hole one can go into with this, right?
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Growing up, one of my “things” with my dad was fishing – we didn’t do it a lot, but when you live in New York City even once a year is a demonstration of remarkable commitment. We’d find a lake upstate and take out a rowboat, or visit friends and borrow their rods to go down to the pond. As he got older, Dad grew increasingly nostalgic for the area he’d grown up in – Sheepshead Bay – and so once every couple of years we’d get up super-early and go out on a fishing boat in the bay. It was awful – freezing cold, smelling of fish guts and beer, nary another woman to be seen – but of course those are some of my favorite memories with my dad. Halfway through the trip I’d always lay down inside the cabin, drink an 8am Coors (when in Rome), and nap with my hat over my face, listening to the seagulls and the waves whapping the boat and my dad telling some stranger about the time he drove his motorcycle through Europe.
Lest this not be clear: I do not especially like fishing. I don’t think my dad, does, either – or at least, it’s not like he’s a “grab a rod and sit on the pier” kinda dude. He wants to do it with me. Same. And I always understood, growing up, that my dad went fishing with me because it had been his thing with his dad. When we went on our fishing trips he’d talk to me about Grandpa, and afterwards we’d drive around the neighborhood where he was a kid and he’d point out where he worked, or where he went to school. One of the only things he still has of his dad’s is his fishing box, and when I was little I would go through Grandpa’s! Tackle Box! in a full state of awe, making my dad tell me all about each lure, each little rainbow fish.
For years, my dad and I talked about finding a place to go fishing now that they’re out here in California. We didn’t. Now my son is 13, and my daughter is 10, so the last time my dad said “want to go fishing?” I didn’t just say yes; I said “Saturday?” We all sat together on a swaying dock that wasn’t a place we were supposed to sit, I don’t think, and we were too hot and didn’t bring food or towels or anything because, as mentioned before, we are not actually fisherpeople. We caught nothing, as is our tradition.
Of course I loved it. Of course I will remember it.
I showed my son my grandpa’s tackle box, and told him that grandpa used to fish with his own dad. “How often did you two go?” my son wanted to know, something I realized then that I’d never asked.
“Once,” my dad said.
***
I did a podcast interview yesterday during which the host asked me whether I still felt as comfortable sharing the hard stuff, the big, personal stories. The short answer is no, because what I want to write about has changed. I want to write about my parents getting older. I want to write about my children pulling away. Except those stories I want – ache, really – to tell: They involve people who don’t just populate my little blog posts; they populate my world.
So I am careful.
And careful is no way to write.
This story, for example, about fishing. On the surface, it breaks my heart. Of course. But of course it’s more complicated than that, and of course it is not my story to tell; the day they spent together is a day I’ll never know.
What I do know: I will fish with my grandchildren, should I have them. I will tell them the few stories I have about their great-great grandfather, and I will tell them many about my own father. I know my children very well, and so I know that they will do the same; this odd pastime that none of us seemingly enjoy and yet all of us do nonetheless…it’s made its way, somehow, into our family lore. Somehow, that single fishing trip 70 years ago managed to pull on strings that still reach through generations. Fishing. Of all the damn things.
We can’t know what our children will remember; what memories will be the ones they call back to again and again. My daughter’s favorite story to tell strangers is “the time mommy forgot me at Target,” so, you know, that’s not ideal. But she also tells me that one of her favorite memories is of sitting alone on the white bench near our house, looking at the mountains and feeling utterly at peace.
She will blink; I will, too. Moments and years will pass. I wonder if she will remember the silks. The Target trip. The white bench. Even, maybe, the tackle box filled with rainbow fish. Even just the once.
