by Colette Merrill
(This post is not referring to traumatic memories of the kind that scar the human psyche for a lifetime, but I am referring to the bad memories that are common to all of mankind.)
A wooden roller coaster still standing after the amusement park closed, it’s still in pretty good shape for as old as it was.
Aren’t memories grand? I love memories, especially the good ones. Watching an episode of the “Everybody Loves Raymond” series, I laughed until my sides hurt. It’s the one where Ray’s brother got married. One of the truest episodes I had enjoyed of his shows. It shows the humor of some of our worst nightmares.
The real-life scenario of the show was the editing of the memories that we all must do from time to time. We’ve all had some bad memories, some worse than others, and those memories we must shove into a closet, shiver, and label “forget this one.” Once filed away, we are able to return to our normal smiling self until enough time has passed by, until we find some of the memory leaks out by a cue from a friend who begins the story by saying something like, “Remember the time…?” We can have one of two reactions when we realize which memory they are bringing up.
The first one is anger, and we can slam shut the door on that memory again. The second reaction is the opposite; by finding humor in the story, we can thereby shed ourselves of it entirely. We’ve all experienced both of them, but I prefer the latter. So often is the case if enough time has passed by. So goes life.
I do prefer the good memories, the ones of childhood innocence. The simple memories that we remember for a lifetime. Sights, sounds, laughter, odors. I was raised on the East Coast, R.I., to be precise. The Ocean State: (Official) This nickname was formulated to attract tourism to Rhode Island and appears on non-commercial license plates. “Ocean State” began appearing on Rhode Island license plates in 1972, replacing “Discover.” The Rhode Island Tourism Division promotes over 400 miles of coastline and the large bays and inlets that make up about 14% of its total area.
Just a little history, but the truth of the matter is that the smell of the salt water in the air, the sparkling sand, sea shells, sea weed, the smell of low tide, and “quahogging” are some of my fondest memories as a child. We’d walk into the water at low tide and walk up to our ankles. This was the fun part, we would do something like the twist and dig our feet into the sand until we felt the quahog under our toes. Then we would bend down and pick the quahog up from the hole we dug and put it into the basket. We would move a step or two if we felt no more in that hole and twist until we felt more of them. We would do this until dad said to stop, we had enough.
Sadly, it is not legal to do any quahogging anymore unless you get a permit. That was one of my favorite things. Another was Rocky Point. They had the best clam cakes at the Pavilion, and the rides were the best. Rides came and went. I’ll never forget the ride called the Fish. It was shaped like a dolphin, it was a car that sat one or two people, that ran on roller coaster tracks. I’ll never forget that the first corner we went around, the nose was over the edge before the car turned, and it was a scary thing. I screamed, but my brother just laughed.
When my brother and I went back to RI in 1998, we saw the park was closed but the coaster was still standing. The Pavilion was still there and open, and the clam cakes were just as good as they ever were, but we noticed that the seagulls were more brazen than ever and would swoop down and snag that clam cake right out of your hand. The wooden roller coaster was the last thing to be torn down in the park once it was sold and closed down. Things have changed a lot in RI as time goes by, and more people come into the tourist areas. Shortly after Ronnie and I finished our visit and went home, that roller coaster was torn down, and the Pavilion closed too. It’s all but a memory now.
My parents owned a motorboat when they were still together, and we would all go boating on the weekends. We would jump off the boat wherever it anchored and swim around it. They made me wear a life jacket since I still wasn’t sure how to swim, just dog-paddled since I hadn’t started school yet. In R.I. when I did start school, they taught us how to actually swim. If your school didn’t have a swimming pool, they would bus you to a school that had one so you could get lessons. I did learn to swim at an early age for those days, but it seems I always knew how to stay afloat by treading water or back-float.
There was one hot summer day that I will never forget. At the time, I thought it was strange, but I have been living in the tornado belt for more than 40 years now. I know what the signs meant then. I was outside on our swing set when this happened. It was real hot, and the sun suddenly disappeared, it grew very cold and dark, nothing was moving, not even a bird singing. My mother called me into the house and sent me down in the basement, but didn’t tell me why. After a little bit, probably just a few minutes, the sun came back out, and it got warmer again, but not hot. She didn’t tell me why it did that, but I will never forget that particular day either.
Anyway, our summer days were filled with swimming, eating watermelon, mosquito bites, climbing trees, and playing outside all day long. Those certainly were good memories.