Low Frequency Yellow
by james bezerra
The memories don’t seem to come to me with the same clarity and color that other people have. I remember the elements of fact. I remember in broad strokes. This is the quality that made me a good student of history. I remember how one moment flows into the next and I remember what was important about the moments.
The moments themselves are rather flat.
The moments themselves are rather flat.
The memories come to me that way. Flat.
They’re also liars.
I have trouble knowing what I remember and what my brain has colored into the empty spaces. My brain is just trying to help; making stereoscopic memories out of ones that might otherwise be only half memories.
It is like that with the bus.
Greyhound trips between home and the coast. Two hours by car, almost four on the bus. I remember those trips and I know that I remember them. Because I must remember them. Because I am remembering them right now.
Only I’m not.
I would be lying if I told you that I remember the low frequency yellow smell of sweat that the blue seats gave off. I have no idea if they were even blue. I have no idea if they smelled like sweat. I don’t remember. Right now I can’t even summon the memory of a smell. I’m not sure that I ever can. I can recognize smell and that smell may ping the metadata of memory and bring something up on the dumbwaiter that we call ‘memory’, but is that the same as remembering?
I know that I used to hop the bus to my sister’s on the Central Coast of California. She was in school in San Luis Obispo. Her boyfriend managed the student diary and he lived there in a little foreman’s apartment off tiled the main lobby and I know that I would sit there in a beanbag chair on his little patio and I would look out west to Bishop’s Peak on the other side of the black ribbon of Highway 1.
But this is where the problems start.
Because that is not a memory. It is a construction. It is artificial. It is not untrue, but it also isn’t truth. Oh the dilemmas I have!
Here, watch this:
Dana was inside but she had Randy Travis playing in the little apartment as she washed plastic plates in the little stainless steel sink in the kitchenette. The slider was open and “Forever and Ever, Amen” was warbling out to me. She was into Randy Travis back then and he was at the height of his skill: a little country, a little bluegrass, a little bluesy. “You may wonder how/I can promise you now/this love that I feel for you always will be …” Plus he was good looking for a country star, then. That was right before country music finally got the pop music makeover. Blame Shania Twain for that.
I was about 13 and doodling my binder. Mom said I was burning through wirebound notebooks too fast so she’d made me start writing on loose leaf in a three ring binder.
From the little concrete pad of patio out the sliding door I could see the freeway and Bishop’s Peak past that, the highest point in that skinny backbone of mountains that separates SLO from the true beach towns on the otherside
I heard Dana shut the water off and then she hollered out to me, “Hey ….”
Only I don’t know what she hollered out to me and I don’t remember if she was washing dishes just then when I was sitting out on the patio looking past the freeway to Bishop’s Peak. Though I may not have even been looking at Bishop’s Peak, because that was West of the patio but that exterior wall ran East-West, so to sit comfortably against it in a bean bag chair I would have been facing south.
These are the problems of memory.
I know that each of those facts is true. I know because I googled half of them.
My memory says, “What was that one Randy Travis song that Dana used to listen to?
My memory says, “Had Mom stopped buying me notebooks by then?”
An hour ago I couldn’t have found Bishop’s Peak on a map.
Are all memories this fickle? Trying to dig to the bottom of a memory and the walls start to collapse like the moat around a sandcastle. Memory just refilling itself and all I remember is the memory as if written on an index card: SLO-DAIRY-DANA-BEAN BAG-TRAVIS-BISHOP-PAPER.
I know that the bus was real. I remember those trips. Lemoore to San Luis on a bus was as much as my parents would allow me to do alone. I don’t know that I remember any one specific trip, but I remember the god almighty thrill of them. That feeling has never left me. Those bus trips were like hours with a slow tattoo artist while he inked the word ‘wanderlust’ across the red muscle of my heart. I remembered that thrill when I hiked the Waterfall Trail to Havasupai in Arizona. I remembered it when I backpacked above the treeline into the Tablelands above the Sequoias and stood looking out over desolate Moose Lake while the Great Western Divide stared back at me with all of its power and ambivalence. I remember that thrill every time I get on a plane and wait for velocity to collide with steel.
The low frequency yellow smell of twenty-year-old bus seats isn’t the thing then; isn’t what makes the memory matter. What makes the memory matter, then, is what it makes us do tomorrow. I feel the ink in the tattoo slosh with every breath I take and I think it is asking me, “Where to next?” and that’s what what matters most: the making of the memories, the next set of sweat-smelling seats on a bus to who-knows-where, the next move, the next adventure out there beyond the comfort zone and above the treeline.
From time to time though - I will admit - I do still hear a little ghost echo, “You may wonder how/I can promise you now …” it sounds like music from another room that has grown scratchy with age, “this love that I feel for you always will be …” but it does make the trip a easier; memories pack light that way.
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