Training Wheels on a Gravel Road

“Forever don’t mean much in passing and forgotten don’t mean that it’s done.” — Richard Dobson

These song lyrics hit me the other day as I was listening to Guy Clark’s version of “For Ever, For Always, For Certain.” The combination of Dobson’s lyrics and the emotional rasp of Guy Clark’s delivery is one of country music’s best moments in my humble opinion.  The lyrics have stuck with me since I first heard them.

One of my earliest memories is of my uncle Jim helping me ride my first bike. It was Christmas and my uncle and I were outside my house on the corner of 6th and Heplar Streets in Ironton, Ohio. It was the 1970s, which year I have no idea. There might have been a “Jack Davis for City Council” sign in the yard. I think I was wearing polyester frog pants and an Ohio State t-shirt. I’m pretty sure Uncle Jim had on a collar he could scratch his back with by turning quickly. I remember the sound and feel of plastic training wheels on the concrete sidewalk. I remember it being cold and gray. I remember the smell of tar. I remember the Kentucky smokestacks across the river. I remember the helping hand of my uncle. For no ascertainable reason, this memory pops up from time to time.

Recently I was walking Harlan and Cerys to the park near our house — Harlan on his new scooter and Cerys on her not-so-new bike tricked out with a new baby carrier. I was distracted — things to be done around the house and work the next day. Cerys was talking about leaf fairies and how well they can hide because they have leaves in their hair and Harlan was recounting a story about getting bitten by a chicken and escaping only to be bitten by a jungle bird.

Then I had that memory again. The bike and the training wheels. I looked down at Cerys’s training wheels rolling over gravel and Harlan’s crouched-over scooter stance and I realized this could be that moment they remember — that fleeting memory that will come back to them at unexpected times of their lives. The one that returns while sitting in a college class, waking up on vacation in another country, washing a dish, or even while walking their own kids down an alley on an uneventful day, this could be that memory flash. Our memories are more than nostalgia. They make us who we are. The irony of memories is you have more when you’re younger. I just now forgot what I used to remember and what else I was going to say about that.

My kids are now at the age of retaining memories. What will they remember about me? Am I living up to the image of the father figure I always expected myself to be? I’ve thought of a few things they might remember about me, in no certain order:

1. I am quick to cut things that get tangled (i.e. shoe strings, hair, iPhone ear buds).
2. I can use every cuss word in the English language without actually moving my teeth or making a noise.
3. Chicken biscuits are an important part of my life.
4. I leave every morning in a lawyer costume and return home in the evening without any fish even though my daughter is certain I fish for a living.
5. Once, at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, I met a character who claimed to be “the Prince Andrew of America.” He was a natural law, sovereign-citizen type who believed every legal act on American soil since July 3, 1776 was heretical and he would be the feudal lord of a large chunk of New England had circumstances been otherwise. He told me this story in such animated fashion he got kicked out of the bar and left with his tail between his legs in tragically post-monarchical fashion. They still don’t find this as fascinating as I do despite being subjected to my recounting it on several long road trips.
6. I talk about Kentucky a lot. And Texas. And Wales.
7. I can make hundreds of different types of food they find disgusting.
8. I don’t believe in Sasquatch but I’m pretty sure I saw a yet-to-be-discovered species of sloth climbing a tree on an Appalachian hillside when I was a kid.

Perhaps this is not the noblest of lists. It’s tempting as a parent to try to create perfect memories for the kids. Really, though, I suspect I have very little control over it. All I can do is be there. The memory fairy strikes when it dang well pleases and it has leaves for hair so you can never see it until it’s gone.