Flash Friday from 3/17/2012 in Flash Friday

There’s this shrink I know, he says we dream in black and white. Maybe it’s a vet and it’s dogs that dream in black and white. I talk to more shrinks than vets. I don’t like talking about dreams. The last memory I have of my folks is black and white. I don’t know why it’s the last memory, I mean there was time, we had time, it just is. I remember thinking as a kid ‘I’m going to remember this just like it is forever, I’m going to bookmark this, dog ear it in my brain, because this is important.’ That last memory wasn’t important; it’s just a snap shot.

We were going somewhere, vacation, when I asked where dad would give me some goofy answer like rolling seventy five with the top down he’d say “Right here, get out” or mom would just smile. The memory was in East Texas, we’d been driving almost two days in the old fairline, or I remember it being a fairline. It was hot, almost ninety degrees by nine in the morning. We’d spent the night in Oklahoma and had been driving since we had pancakes and sausage at about five thirty as the sun was coming up and the air alive with dust.

Dad was puffing on his old straight white dot, his favorite pipe, the smoke billowing up into the open air, and mom would laugh sometimes. I couldn’t hear them from the back. That’s what I wanted to remember forever, the sound of my mom’s laughter, the smell of revelation from my dad’s pipe, the early morning air and rushing of air.

We stopped to fill up in this little east Texas town. I don’t know if the interstate was built yet or we were just taking the back roads. Seems odd now, filling up in a town instead of a little gas island off the freeway. Businesses were just opening up, little kids with ice cream cones holding their mom’s hands, ladies going in the pharmacy to by hats or combs, old guys playing checkers in the heat out on the patio chairs in front of Woolworths.

We pull up and the guys in uniforms jump out and are all “Sir and Ma’am” and checking the oil, dad gets up to stretch his legs, mom is digging around for a nickel so I can get an Orange Nehi out of the machine, and she yells “Sweetie, hang on, get me one too” and I turn around and see her digging in the back seat in her purse for another nickel and dad walking back to the car. I can smell the gasoline and the sage in the air, feel the cold pop in my hand, maybe it’s a Fanta it feels ribbed in the memory, feel the love and joy swelling in my heart. And that’s what I remember.

That’s never what the shrinks or the vets want to talk about. They want to talk about two days later, in the Painted Desert, somewhere in Arizona I think, in a place I couldn’t find again in a hundred years. They stopped the car and my parents, my mom and dad, giggling and smoked walked out towards a big rock, asking me to stay in the car. A ship landed, like an airplane but with stubby little wings and wide body, like a bumble bee with half wings. They got in and the ship was gone. When the State Highway patrol found me a day later I was dehydrated and, I guess, raving spent a week in the hospital with tubes running fluids into me.

I was asked a lot of questions. Thirty years later and I still get asked the same questions. I really just want to know why that memory is black and white.