Why now?
It has not been a matter of suddenly finding the time to get to it. The notion had come to me on a regular basis over the years and even prior to his arrival. There were times that were learning moments for me when his ability to be excited, open, capable of resetting his moods in a split second and so many other things that he has the youthful capacity to do that I have treasured and taken pause to savour.
At the same time, there are moment of his life that he has moved on from and left behind without him even knowing and they are things that I know will predate whatever living memory he can look back to a few years from now. My wife and I and others who have seen Gabriel grow will be able to tell him the things that he used to do but already those conversations leave him puzzled and perhaps even nonplussed as we try to suggest where he has come from and he -- yes even at this formative stage -- was.
When watching Inside Out with him we had to have a conversation with him about the Memory Dump: a dark, forbidding place in the mind that was frightening with its darkness and fade of past. It may have seemed an apocalyptic setting to him, a place of demise although on so many levels that we are otherwise indifferent to. At least we are indifferent to it when we lose those early memories without much contemplation.
In Gabriel's case one of those early disposals to the memory dump was a made up word he sprung upon us when he was just becoming verbal. Amidst all the mama's, dada's and other combinations that my wife and I deciphered during his first year came this utterance: "Abbegard!" We struggled to figure out what it meant. The first thought was that he had latched on to someone else's use of "Oh my God" around him and we went through mental checklists of our own possible use of it and then other people who may have been careless enough to use it around him. Time went on, the checklists turned up empty and we tried to figure out other interpretations.
Apgar? He might have heard the nurses or doctor complete their assessment of him while his mother and I were far too distracted to notice such a calculation being uttered.
Avant garde? That would have been just the tonic for this artsy Dad who would rather pressure him into art school that accounting, engineering or law.
All blue car? No. We didn't even get an impatient shake of the head that we, his parents, were already not gettting it and were out of touch.
All blue cars? Okay, never mind.
I wondered if it was some remnant from a previous life, a soul that had revisited this world clinging to that random fragment of language. A talisman to carry it back to consciousness and to shape the next road that he would follow.
After a while, my wife and I pieced together a pattern. It occurred at moments of celebration or excitement or simple bliss that he wanted to share or punctuate. Abbegard (my spelling) was a highlight of the day, a sign that things were good, great.
Other words formed and over time his single word disappeared. It was pushed aside by a more rational or shared connection to what we see and share each day and eventually it was gone.
As we watched the movie and tried to explain to Gabriel what happened in the Memory Dump and tell him that it was happening to him, I told him about his word and its demise from his vocabulary. He tried repeating Abbegard a few times. He was half-hearted and it was evident that the resurrection was brief, already ending. His word had no chance to return to him.
And so I will write. To preserve those aspects of me, my wife, him and being with him that will not be as indelible as I hope when I am in the moment that I flood with their power. I look to the poignancy, the failure, the renewal and joy that live and morph into one another with such casual, passing power at any moment.
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