This is a sneak preview from the next book (I’m still waiting for someone to write an awesome foreword).
I have several time machines.
Two of the best I carry with me at all times.
One holds up my glasses (my nose) and the other—a pair actually—stick out funny when I pull my hat down too low (my ears).
Every once in a while, a passing whiff or a far-off sound will catch me just right, instantly transporting me back to a place and time long forgotten.
In the quick smell of burning leaves I find myself with my dad, on a Saturday morning in 1968, down at the firehouse, washing Engine 3 with soapy water.
The flinty scent of hot sand takes me to the beaches of Long Island Sound, with my mom, walking slowly along in bare feet, searching for shells.
At the creak of a screen door I’m instantly ten years old, down at the lake, running along the dock and about to cannonball my cousin.
Flying in from nowhere, without warning, triggered by who-knows-what, these memories are often startling in their clarity and context—and they don’t always make sense. A woman once walked briskly past me while I sat on a park bench. I overheard her say something into her cell phone and in a flash I found myself driving through Cleveland while holding my breath. There isn’t enough room here to explain that.
My earliest memory is of being lowered into a hole by my father, who has tied a rope around my waist, and is giggling. It was triggered twenty-five years later by the sudden smell of wet stone.
In the summer of 1963 Dad was building a huge addition on our house and he press-ganged me into service. He had built plywood forms for the new concrete foundation—two parallel walls ten inches apart and five feet high, their bottom edges cut in irregular patterns to conform to the contours of the bedrock outcroppings they straddled. Working off a stepladder, Dad tied a piece of rope around my waist and slowly lowered me into the tight, dark slot of the forms. Kneeling at the bottom, blinking, I was in a different world. The light was dim and still. The air was cool and smelled faintly of rock busted with a sledgehammer. There was a pleasant odor of dampness. Along each wall, in a regular pattern, a grid of small holes on the left wall matched an identical grid on the right. Starting at one end of the wall, I found the first pair of holes. In each hole was an eyeball—Mom’s on the left, Dad’s on the right. My job was to catch the end of a wire thrust to me from the lady behind the left eyeball and pass it through the hole to the man behind the right eyeball. Dad would pull each wire tight and twist it off, locking the walls together at that point.
Working backwards, I shuffled along the bedrock looking for eyeballs. We would start at ground-level and put in all the wire sections up to as high as I could reach, then we’d all move to the next set of holes. When we were done, my knees were skinned and I was filthy, but when Dad lifted me up out of the forms I was as happy as a little kid could be, and later, when the cement truck came and the slurry sizzled down the chute and shot into the forms and welled up around the wires, Dad put his arm around me and said, “I couldn’t have done this without you,” and he meant it.
This memory had been lost to me for over two decades, until one day when my own son was very small. I was trying to trace the hot and cold water pipes in my basement and I needed his help. Holding his hand, I gently led him down the stairs into the dim innards of our old house. I explained the challenge, and then lifted him up onto my shoulders. Holding his little shoes in my hands, I walked slowly while he reached up between the joists to feel for the pipes. “Warm, cool, cool, warm,” he said, as we shuffled along in the gloom.
As I turned left around the oil tank, the musty odor of the damp granite foundation stones suddenly washed past me.
In that instant I was three years old again, down in that dank slot between the concrete forms, with mom and dad, looking for eyeballs.
I gave Jeremiah’s little feet a loving squeeze.
“I couldn’t do this without you,” I whispered.
“Cool,” he said.