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Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

memories

Time travel: returning to the best of times

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Revisit yesterday.

Never mind focusing on what terrible thing would come out of going back in time. Just what if I could? What things would I want to just observe. Imagine being able to cherish an event without worrying about all the other things that drag attention away because of worry or fear or weariness.  This is my list of “If I could go back.”

  • definitely hide where I could see my mother painting in the backyard
  • see the day my mom and dad where washing the car and he turned the hose on her and she doused him with  the sudsy water from the tin pail
  • the night my dad brought my mom home from a date and stood beneath her parents’ window tossing pebbles until her dad pulled up the sash and demanded to know what they were about.  It was midnight and he had asked her to marry him and she had said yes. Her father said, “About time,” pushed down the window and opened a bottle of champagne.
  • my dad coming off a destroyer in Boston Harbor mid WWII for shore leave
  • when my dad was a boy and he and his best friend stole apples from a neighbor’s orchard, got caught and had to work the season harvesting those apples
  • my sister and I when she told me my dolls were actually alive. How was she so convincing?
  • the day my dad took us to meet our grandparents who hadn’t seen us since we were babies. How did I know Grampy’s lap was the best place to take a nap?
  • the day I crawled under the porch to retrieve inner tubes, knowing that dark, web-draped place was infested with spiders, and I returned triumphant with tubes for my sister and myself to go float on the lake with.  She was older than I, but for that one day, I was heroic in her eyes.
  • watch my husband march in Ozzie’s Band when he was a clarinet-playing boy
  • the day we drove up to the house with our baby girl for her first day at home
  • my graduation ~ Oh heck, all three of them
  • watch me on skis for the first time tumbling my way down the mountain. Maybe this time I’ll laugh.
  • that first dinner date with my husband. I want to know if it was visible how much my legs were shaking
  • the first time my daughter walked all by herself was at the daycare center. I really wanted to see that.
  • see my grandmother on her stone stoop on that tiny island in Sweden: a young woman who couldn’t wait to come to America
  • my mom at one of her photo shoots
  • see my face when my dad told me we could just turn around and walk away, and we were in line behind the bridesmaids ready to enter the church where I was about to get married (I stayed ~ 34 years now. One of my best decisions)
  • my father flying search and rescue missions for a Maryland CAP unit
  • lazing around on the shores of Lake Powell or my husband’s outrageous skiing technique in the side channels while other campers whooped and yelled their praise
  • hear my daughter’s three-year-old version of umbrella just once more
  • the day I walked home from the university clinic with news I was pregnant and didn’t realize I was grinning ear to ear until I was halfway to the house
  • that crash landing my father walked away from that curled the tips of his plane’s propeller a good foot
  • my father-in-law dancing with my mother-in-law before he knew she would one day be his wife

What would you want to go back and see. Splurge, name three.

#timetravel
#favorite*memories
#what*if

Losing my mother one precious memory at a time.

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Casting light on the darker moments.

The past year has been one of a calculated effort to connect with my mother as she slips into dementia.  Two years ago she was a vibrant business woman, respected and successful.  I left a message on her phone each Wednesday night, my “Wednesday Love Call,” and then I would call on the only day she wasn’t at work, Sunday, and we would chat about our varied experiences that week.

When I was a teenager coming home after a really bad day of teenhood, I would sit down with my mother and spill out my troubles, but they always made us laugh.

  •  “Mom, I dropped a book from my locker today, and it landed on the head of the cutest boy in school. His locker is below mine, which is ridiculous.  I’m 5’2″ and he’s 6’2″.”
  • “Mom, the college prep class I’m taking is weird.  Even the teacher looked at me like I must be lost to be in her class.  It’s been more than a week, and I feel I am trying to break in on a clique of beach girls. I want to be at the beach, but I am not crazy about the company.”  
  • “Mom, that teacher asked me if I had read The Source by Michener.  I want to write my analysis essay on it, and she doesn’t even believe I have read the book I have chosen.”

As an adult, these phone calls always served to make life something I could laugh at.  Together we made the perfect funny bone.

  • Mom, I just spent the morning cleaning up dog vomit which my husband made sure to point out to me just before I stepped in it.  He gets up at least an hour before I do. It was very cold through the paper towels.  Do you know he was very annoyed about the affect of stomach acid on linoleum?
  • Mom, my students were particularly energetic yesterday.  I made them get out of their seats and do jumping jacks, and then we started on the lesson.  Today they wanted to know if we would be exercising again.  Shucks, we do exercises every day: grammar.
  • Mom, your granddaughter asked me if I would still love her when she is a big girl using the potty instead of pullups.  The doctor was right: she definitely was potty trained before four years old.  All it took was telling her I would love her every time she grew bigger.  Instant potty trained child.  Really this is prime information every parent needs and no one shared.

These days she gets caught in loops, repeating herself.  I tell her about the weather over and over like she hasn’t already asked me three times.  I call prepared to tell her a story that will make her laugh, because she knows there is something very wrong with her memory and that unspoken knowledge ensnares her in fits of weeping if I don’t keep her focused on something humorous.

  • Mom, she’s a junior now and wants to be an engineer.  Oh, she’s wanted to do that since she was about twelve.  Her birthday is in June.  But I’ve been telling her she is not allowed to grow any more since she was about seven, and I think this time she is listening to me.
  • No, Mom, even if you moved half way here it would still be a long way to walk.  About four hundred miles, which would leave your feet a bit sore.  And then there’s that long walk back.
  • Well, Mom, occasionally the grading does get me down, but when it’s 11:50 PM and I read an essay in which the student has written, “Marlowe was really confused when he found the book written in cypher, and he thought there was a spy trying to steal the ivory, but it was really a skinny Russian guy wearing patched clothes.  What was Conrad thinking when he wrote that?” Of course, then I have to explain the book to her, and by the time I am done, we’ve had quite a chuckle.

This woman I call my mother is my father’s last wife, so she didn’t give birth to me.  But she and I have always had a favorite “you say, I say” — “I almost remember giving birth to you.”  “Mom, I almost remember it, too.”

This could be me thirty years from now, and if I don’t write these books now, they will never be written.  Whatever the dream, don’t let it die with you.  Don’t let it become lost one day in the thunderous shift of a mind. 

My life with dogs

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Lovey – ready for any adventure

I have had several dogs in my life, all lovely ladies. Each has given me years of devotion, enthusiastic support, and a warm sympathetic shoulder.  This post honors the girls no longer with us along with the two that currently make our lives a delight.

KELLY: a standard red dachshund my father acquired at the local pound in Costa Mesa, California.  She was already grown and well-seasoned with experience around children or she would have run away upon entering a house with five kids under the age of seven and a quite settled cat.  All of us, including the cat, formed an instant attachment to her.  She endured being wrapped up to look like she was wearing a babushka, aka my baby brother’s rather rangy blanket; carried about by my sisters and I with an arm wrapped about her upper torso and the rest dangling down to our knees; and numerous moves about the country (CA to MN to CA to PA to MA to NJ) all in less than four years). My strongest memory of that little lady occurred during a thunderstorm when I was eight.  The towering oak growing just outside our den was hit by lightening sending a twenty-foot-long, eight-inch in diameter limb to the ground where we normally kept our boat which had been moved to the backyard to undergo repairs (excellent timing for an engine update).  Our father was out on a date.  We spent the evening searching for Kelly.  It was a bit of a treasure hunt to us kids.  She’d been there in the den moments before the tree limb crashed to the ground.  We were moving to the upstairs to search further when our father arrived.  He kept telling us she would show herself when she was ready, but he followed us about on our search any way.  Found: Spare bedroom, armchair with skirting around the bottom, two white starred burgundy eyes reflected the flashlight we’d shown underneath it.  In that splash of light, those eyes wiggled and nearly sent us scurrying back down stairs.  My father caught us mid-scramble and checked under the chair to pull out Kelly who was fit to shake her bones out from inside her own skin.

She had style.

LADY:  a lab the color of milk chocolate who looked like a bear cub as a pup, pudgy, with hair that stood on end like fuzz.  She leaped off an overlook, by accident, of course.  She was jumping up to sit on the top of a low rock wall where my husband was standing looking down, and over she went, slipping due to the ice on the top.  She fell a good fifty feet and landed on the only section of dirt in a carved out rock ledge.  We  raced back to the house, located rope, a large side-open duffel bag and a warm blanket.  We skidded our way back through icy roads hoping she hadn’t moved from the small ledge.  When we returned to the site, it had snowed in our absence of more than an hour.  (Yes, I should have stayed, but my husband was not about to leave me alone at an empty roadside overlook.)  We ran to the rock wall and looked over.  Neither of us could see any sign of her.  We screamed her name.  Imagine two people leaning over a wall yelling, “Lady! Hey, Lady.”  Aw,  we can laugh now.  Suddenly, a small snow flurry appeared on the rock ledge below.  And there was our girl looking up at us. She was clearly stiff, cold and frightened.  We scrambled to tie off ropes and toss over the bag with its tether which I kept hold off, having nothing else to clutch as my husband preceded to repel down the cliff edge to get to her.  Mind you, he had never repelled in his life, but at 24 he felt fairly confident that day was not going to be his last.  She waited for him right up until she saw he intended to stuff her inside a bag and zipper it up.  She fought him with every fiber of her six-month-old canine body.  But she didn’t know he was not going to waste his time nearly killing himself going down and then up a cliff without bringing back the spoils.  He won, then climbed back up.  I learned how to pray better that day.  Then the two of us pulled up the bag, unzipped it, pulled her out and wrapped her double in a blanket.  No broken bones, lots of little cuts and one sizable half moon slice in a foot that showed bone and tendons when lifted — so stitches and a white bandage she was quite proud of was her only souvenir, that and a fear of heights.

Lovey – bathing beauty

LOVEY:  Lived to be fifteen years old, a deep chocolate Labrador, seventy-six pounds of solid rock.  She tangled with something in our back yard.  She had in a matter of two minutes managed to acquire a slice in her scalp that laid bare a good two inches of skull and two punctures in her chin.  I was about five months pregnant at the time and had college class to get to, but I hauled her off to the vet and left her sedated to get bandaged, and returned from class to pick her up.  The vet had found it necessary to shave the top of her round crown, trim tissue around the cut and stitch her up with fourteen stitches, fourteen very stiff, long black stitches which stood up from her head like a Mohawk haircut due to the tightness at which he had had to pulled the skin together. Her favorite activities were swimming, having shovelfuls of snow dumped on her while the driveway was cleared and running circles around my husband as he road his dirt bike.

Our girls today.

And now LACEY & CAGNEY:  One is a deep chocolate brown, nearly black Labrador, while the other is the palest of yellow labs.  They curl up like reverse image bookends, and we wonder if they choreograph their positioning.  The blonde loves the vet even though he is always treating her for allergies, while the other who hasn’t a physical complaint to speak of acts like she is off to her death every time we go in for yearly shots.  She curls her toes so her steel-hard nails become ice skates then slips all over the vet’s linoleum floor getting more and more out of control as she loses her balance and her grace while Cagney looks on as if to say, “Really, I can’t take you anywhere.”  Of course, this observation is coming from a Labrador that cannot traverse the back yard without checking for unfriendlies along every foot of the walkway.  Opposites, absolute opposites.