A Million Little Loops

Memorial Day 2019. We got in a fight because I wanted to go to Coney Island and have a hot dog and Patrick wanted to go to the gym. We often had these fights. I wanted holidays to be special. He wanted to exercise. I wanted to have the perfect day. He wanted to break a sweat.

I wanted the beach and the train to the beach, straight out of Just Kids—the book that had led me here in some strange way. But he was mad, it was hot, and we didn’t speak much. We weren’t even planning to hit the water. I just wanted to go and know it was there for me if I wanted it. I didn’t push the other thing I wanted to do—visit the grave of my great grandparents somewhere in Brooklyn. Actually I knew where, but I also knew that to get there would be a train and a bus and a walk, and we had only been in New York a week. It was ambitious, and I would be lucky to get him to the beach. 

The sky was a perfect blue with perfect clouds and I remember that because I took a picture not because I remember. We used the public restrooms, baked in the sun in line at Nathan’s, and found a seat. I hoped that it was worth it, but the sweaty train back to Brooklyn left me unconvinced.

I didn’t just want the beach and the hot dog. I wanted the day to mean something, as I often did. On Memorial Day you remember, but you also look ahead to a summer that’s on the horizon. Just like on Christmas you eat a lot and on Thanksgiving you see all your cousins. 

Memorial Day has rolled around again. One year in New York. Two months in quarantine. I think about next Memorial Day and I think about Labor Day of this year. The other half of the summer sandwich. What will it look like? What will be sandwiched between these two holidays?

I think about my grandparents and their grandparents and all the people that made me who and where I am today. I think about my grandpa—who would be 99 today, on a ship off the coast of this city that I live in now, and what the skyline looked like to him. I remember the navy blues he wore that I held in my hands last summer in my parents’ basement. They were smaller than I expected, stiff with time, and his name was right there, stitched or drawn on. I can’t remember which. Gustav Blomquist.

I think of Patrick’s granddaddy who yesterday, just shy of 93, passed from this world of time and into another. I think of him stationed far away for the same reasons that my grandpa was in his navy uniform, and of his house full of things that now sits empty, and I remember the first time I visited that Tallahassee house over a cool fall weekend in 2013. Miriam and Leon were like a warm weighted blanket. I loved them instantly.

I wonder where all those things will go and why we don’t think about our own things sitting idle one day. I think about my parents going through decades of things from their parents, worried that they will keep too much and not enough. Too much that I will one day be going through, and not enough to remember them by. I wonder how I can remember to ask my parents all the questions I wish I had asked my grandparents. How I will remember all the answers, and I decide I will write them down. 

And then I’m back. Back to here and now on 91st Street. Having taken a journey through time and place, my own memories and ones I have acquired from others. In a loop of graveyards and beaches and photo albums that are joined like a paper chain with a million little loops. Too many to count. “Time brings odd mutations,” says Joan Didion in the book I picked up last summer off our sublet shelf, and that’s my favorite thing about it. Happy Memorial Day.