How is a child’s mind imprinted? Let’s look at a moment in time…a boy of five is playing on the living room floor. His mother is at the pantry sink, which cuts between the living room and kitchen. Mother is rinsing vegetables in a strainer and placing them on a dishtowel to dry to her left. She sings sweetly under her breath. There’s a television in the living room corner with some clown trying to get his attention with big smiles and waving hands interspersed with big laughs like a duck quacking. The house smells like onions and chicken bubbling from a pan on the stove. Broth from a soup mother is creating. She will cut the vegetables soon and add them to the pot.

The door opens from the hall adjoining the living room, and Father enters. He looks worn out, like he’s been running in the hot sun. Dirty clothes and dirty hands. Holes in his jeans and worn-out shoes. The boy looks at his shoes as his father walks by without saying a word to his son. He walks past his wife, and she says hello, and the man slaps her across the face…
   “Shut up! I told you I’d take care of it…,” or something like that. Thinking back, he could have sworn his mother only said hello…could it have been something else. The boy cries for his mother, and his father rushes into the living room as if to strike him…
   “That job was supposed to be finished an hour ago! You’re a worthless excuse for a man…get out…you’re fired!” He shouts as the boy runs to his mother, and his father goes into the bathroom and shuts the door.
   “It’s okay, Marty…it’s okay. Daddy had a bad day…a bad day,” she says as she cries into her son’s neck.

Let’s look at another moment in time…a boy of ten comes home from school. The bus stops in front of his home, and his mother usually meets him. Today, she is curiously absent, and the boy walks up to the front door and steps into the dark apartment. He is lying on the floor with his mother. She has black
eyes and swollen lips, and she can’t seem to get up on her feet.
   “Marty…listen to me…you have to call an ambulance…it’s important to say that I fell and hit the coffee table. After you do that, put some ice in a dishtowel and give it to me…do you understand?”
   “Yes…what happened?”, he asked even though he knew.
   “Do as I say…NOW!”
   “Okay,” he says. After that day, she had to walk with a cane because the damage to her back never healed. His hate for his father seethed, and a new form of thinking permeated him. Both of preservation and persecution…violence and vengeance…there was something he needed to do…but where did this idea come from? Imprint indeed!

How does our interpretation of a thing give it meaning? The glass is half full…the glass is half empty…but what if you drink from a clay cup? Someone is bound to make a false assumption…a skewed interpretation. We ask someone a question and listen to their reply… determining whether it’s the truth or a lie. In that instance, we accept what they’re saying as a fact. Marty realized that Jason had been watching him since he was a little boy. How he interacted with him, with his mother, if he held him, lost his temper and expectations, and was easily disappointed in everyone. It’s much the same as being graded for your job performance…in this case, the gold star Marty received for years of neglect was his son’s body hanging by a rope.

Later, he received another one for Margaret, who died from an overdose of Valium, wine, and self-loathing. When Jason was found, he still had a faint pulse. He was rushed to the hospital and placed on a ventilator but was brain dead. Marty followed the doctor from the waiting room and was led to Jason. He would not survive, and the rest of his organs were shutting down. Margaret had been sedated and unconscious in another room so she wouldn’t have a total nervous breakdown. When the doctor gave him the news, he couldn’t fathom it. Denial dominated his rational thinking with anger enough to rip the doctor’s head off. But when he saw Jason, the gravity of the image was unbearable. Why? What a stupid question for him to ask himself…why? A question he inherently knew the answer to. Marty was always cold but clung to everything and everyone as one of his possessions. Yet, at that moment…he felt true loss.

   “You’ll have to sign a release so that we can unplug your son’s life support,” the doctor said, consoling. Marty signed the paper. It would only compound the horror of loss if Margaret saw Jason die twice…once by hanging and once in a hospital bed, melting into gray skin tones and cold embraces and screams. And what of dying twice? Was there something that Marty could have done? How did he miss his son’s pain? Was Jason crying out, or did he hide it well, even if he had caught the signs in time…was Jason predestined for suicide? Marty’s father was as bad as any parent could be…cold, demanding, cruel, and abusive, interspersed with shades of fatherly love. Interested one moment and couldn’t care less the next. Was bipolar a thing back then? Schizophrenia or split personality? Who knows? Marty’s mind ached with questions…how bad of a father was he? How bad of a husband? Did Jason have a fragile personality like his mother, or did Marty fracture their character over the years?

Imprinting? Let’s look at a moment in time…a boy of twelve and his younger brother of eight were in a car going to Maine on a camping trip. Marty is in the front seat. He has mixed feelings about his father, who hasn’t been drinking for two years, and though he doesn’t beat his mother any longer, Marty can’t stand him…his mother is a cripple because of him. She has various scars on her face and several teeth missing. She was such a good woman and had always been a source of love for him and his brother. This is the second time they’ve made this trip, and though he still has a short fuse and can be verbally abusive, it’s been better than before.

Unfortunately for Marty, his father’s bad behavior has spawned a thought process that is never satiated until a particular end is played out in his imagination. His teacher at school told the class about Nicholas Tesla and how he could create a machine in his mind, work out all its particulars, and then build it flawlessly. Marty has that gift; in this case, the device is replaced by a scenario. They play out perfectly like a school play with a beginning, middle, and end. The final scene always results in a funeral and deep satisfaction.

They set up the tents and built a fire pit. The woods of Maine are magnificent, and other families come to this spot as well. There is a lake and a common area with showers and restrooms. Marty’s brother Jeremy hangs onto Marty’s every move as Marty is looked up to as a protector. They fish all afternoon and catch a few fish for supper, and even though Father sat by the fire reading some magazines, he helped the boys clean the fish and cook it in a cast-iron pan and some beans and bread. He let them each drink some coffee, which Marty did not care for when he was young but learned to love when he got older.

After supper, they sat around the fire, and Father told a few boring stories about when he worked construction…which was more like moving piles of dirt with his mentality and temperament…always going from job to job…getting fired for incompetence or fighting with other workers or managers. Coming home and taking it out on his family. Eventually, it was time to go to bed. The boys went to their tent, and Marty’s father went to his. The next morning, when they woke. Marty and Jeremy went to use the facilities, and when they returned, they waited for their father to wake up.

Finally, they looked in, and he was gone. The police were eventually called, and after a search, he was found in the lake. They gathered he must have gone for a night swim and drowned. An empty whiskey bottle was found inside his tent, so they assumed he got drunk and went swimming or committed suicide. To protect their mother, they called it drowning. The scenario that Marty had nurtured for so many years had come to fruition. In his thoughts he kept repeating the words of the stranger he met on the railroad track…Make him a memory…make him a memory…make him a memory…

TM DiSarro

From: THE MEMORY OF RAIN