It is the day before Thanksgiving.  I wake up a bit bitter, and lost in retirement, but I suddenly realize that I need to move on, and enjoy new pursuits, new chapters.  Someone better off for the new road.

I start to work on a more relaxed Randall, one who existed before ambition took hold, the person who used to be more like his mother. I had almost forgotten this model, placing memories of her aside after she passed in 1995, due to the pain. Our long-time Roswell neighbor, Jenny, knew this. She said it openly at the time of Mom’s funeral. “Randy Ray is in denial.”

I had almost forgotten this side, focusing on Dad’s needs and the more striving LeCocq side after her passing. I had almost forgotten the calm Hindmans and Riders from Winterset and Newton, with their Midwestern twangs and positive outlooks, and my maternal grandmother, Pearl, whom I was especially close to, the Christian Science Reader who never said anything negative about anyone. Yes, I would attempt to recall the boy of the Great Plains: Roswell, Kansas, and Lubbock.

I would focus on the positive. I would take writing seminars in Missoula, sketching courses at the Holter, or French at Carroll.

So what happened to ease the burden? In Christian Science, they would call it a “healing.” But, I think my mother stepped in. The day before, I had found myself looking at a photo of her and my dad on my bookcase, and had moved it to my desk, closer, without thinking anything of it. But, I was studying mom. I found I could focus on her face, and remember her voice. It was as if a closed part of my brain had reopened.

I was reminded of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, his novel of Vietnam and the memories the soldiers carried with them which kept them whole. O’Brien’s message was the importance of memory. Memories not only make the living whole, they also bring people back to life, keeping them living. The dead are like unused books, on the bookshelf, never taken down and opened.

In the novel, Tim O’Brien went back and rescued little Linda, his nine-year-old childhood friend who died of a brain tumor. He went back and they were skating on the pond in Minnesota, and he did some spins, and leaped into the dark air, and came down thirty years later a whole Timmy, connected by memories, showing how he got from where he was to where he is at age 43. Little Linda brought Timmy back, the real Tim, pre-Vietnam, who he was, saving him. And he saved her, taking her off the shelf. Memories save.

On this day, I, too, apparently went back, to New Mexico as a kid, and found Mom, and am taking that leap. Or, maybe she found me.