Memory Forms

Nancy Dillon Memory Forms

60 I have these zinc charette forms—geometric primitives: cones, rectangles, cylinders, and pyramids. They’re anywhere from 4 to 12 inches high, depending on the shape. I display them as decorative objects, but their original intent was as a teaching tool for drawing class. The idea is the teacher arranges the forms in a still- life composition, and the students try to recreate it on paper, building 3D shapes on their 2D sketchpads. The exercise is designed to heighten the students’ awareness of shadow and light and how the two work together to construct solid form. The fact that the shapes are simple is key to the exercise. There is no complexity to distract from the underlying structure of the subject. The structure is the subject.

When I think about the progression of my life through time, I imagine these dark forms stacked up against each other along a central line. The shapes form an irregular landscape: the pointy tips of the cones jut up from a low sea of broad rectangles; the cylinders, tall and thick, curve gently through space, tangential to the hard edges of straight shapes; the multiple facades of pyramids, all originating from a single point, slope downward, angled in different directions, bracketing negative space. These are the varying shapes and sizes of my memories arranged along the path of my existence. Some are strong pillars to hug and lean against and gain calm. Others are sharp and aberrant, stabbing up to heights high above the others; first to be seen and felt always with as much force as when they were formed. Some are there solely to define absence, the what-ifs and might-have-beens of angles unturned. I zoom far above the arrangement, where I can analyze its form in total. From this height, I see where I’ve wasted time and expended too much energy building up elaborate structures that cut me off from my central path—the cragged nooks and recursive cul-de-sacs where I get lost and ruminate on distorted images and thoughts. This perspective allows me to grasp the magnitude of the towering heaviness that pushes down on me, holding me in place.

From up above, I want to reach down and fix the imbalance in my composition, adjusting components, so that the more pleasing parts have a chance to be seen—a shift in balance between the ugly and the serene. In this way, I can alter bad memories of past events. And I don’t mean to change the outcome of what’s happened or forget the harm I felt. It’s more like introducing a little tweak in emphasis, or maybe even realizing something new, something that’s always been there but not first remembered. Something that, when recalled, makes me half-smile and say, “Oh yeah…that happened too.”

For instance, I have this memory from second grade. I’m on the playground before the start of school. I wanted to play jump rope. The version where you have two people working each end, while others skip through.

Approaching different clusters of girls, I held my rope out like an offering, “Wanna jump rope?” The girls giggled, a prelude to their refusals. After about three tries, I gave up.

I was a quiet child—distant and calm…too calm. Even at this young age, I had a tendency to lock into a long, faraway stare, never thinking of anything. In third grade, one of my

teachers laughed at my class picture.

“Talk about a deer in the headlights,” she said as she handed me my packet of photos. There was one girl stiller than me. Her name was Cindy, and she might have been developmentally slow. In second grade, we each got a cardboard nametag for our desks. The 2-inch by 8-inch strip wasn’t fixed in place, and it didn’t take long before someone invented a game where you twirled your nameplate around on the top of your desk, like the spinner of a board game. Everyone succumbed to the urge to spin, except Cindy. She never touched her nameplate. She just sat still at her desk, all day long.

The teacher commended Cindy for her ability to resist temptation. “You see how neat Cindy’s name tag is?”

All of our desks were marked up by the dust and dirt distributed by our spinning nametags, but not Cindy’s. I felt pangs of guilt and shame at my failure to maintain stillness. I wanted to be still like Cindy. Maybe that was my problem. Left to myself on the playground, I stood staring with my rope, looped up like a lasso, and my school bag, waiting for the bell to ring. I probably looked pitiful, gazing out over nothing, holding a rope for no reason. That’s what must have inspired a bunch of girls, former nay-sayers, to approach me.

One among them spoke for the group. “We’ll play with you.”

Her offer snapped me out of my trance. Excited, I dropped my bag and unfurled my rope.

Then, another girl — tall with a jet-black bob and bangs — stepped forward. “Yeah, because we feel sorry for you.”

I froze. I scanned the faces of the other girls. Everyone was squinting with morning sun in their eyes, hands on hips or crossed over chests, shoes impatiently tapping or kicking at pebbles on the knee-scraping asphalt, waiting for me to accept their invitation so we could all get this over with. But before anything could happen the bell rang, and everyone before me scattered like birds from a tree rattled by the wind. This moment of rejection is vivid in my mind. Even decades later, I clearly see it all unfolding in the morning light of early fall, and I feel the excitement, and then the embarrassment and shame that the girls and their words welled up in me. The stabbing points tower high above all other details, but they’re only the tip of what occurred...painful, yes...but only the top portion of a deeper scene.

In my real-world arrangement of charette forms, one of the shapes is a cube. The taller ones dwarf it, almost like it doesn’t belong in the set. The curious thing about it is that it’s also a box with a lid. It tickles me that the manufacturer did this, as if anything square must exist to contain something. I like that I can hide stuff in there—stuff only I’d know about. Then I’d wait to forget and, months or even years later, I’d open the box and find a surprise.

My landscape of memories has a lot of little boxes like this, down low, deep in an undergrowth of details not first remembered. If I’m careful and slow, I can trace the contours of the harsher shapes downward to where the small containers have been planted, each waiting for me to open. There, with no particular expectation other than surprise, I reveal the treasures they contain, and the memories I unpack unfold into new shapes that restructure my past.

Sure, I was a quiet kid, probably weird, but so what? I had something those girls would never have. I had my rope. It was an old clothesline rope that my dad used for tasks like tying our canoe to the roof of the car or shoring up saplings. What I held on the playground was only a portion of his stash—a piece he gave me for skipping.

The rope, tinged off-white by dirt, was stiff from being wet then dried, except for the frayed ends, where the unbraided threads were soft and wavy and bright white. It smelled like earth, cut grass and wood dust...a byproduct of hanging in the garage where my dad kept the lawn mower, these wobbly old saw horses, and canvas tarps he used as drop cloths for painting

or transporting piles of autumn leaves to the curb.

My dad taught me how to wrap the rope. Hold your arm up like you’re getting ready to arm wrestle. Hold one end in the hand of the raised arm, and then wrap the rope down and around your elbow and back up to your hand. Keep doing that until the rope runs out.

So that’s what I did that morning on the playground after the girls left me standing alone, and I did it fast, demonstrating my mastery of the technique. This simple action strengthened me, my little arm working hard to form the loops. It connected me to my dad in a moment of pain, reminding me that he cared enough to equip me with this rope and the knowledge of how to handle it.

By unpacking this detail, I’ve changed the shape of the entire memory. The rudeness of the girls, their pity and my horror at being pitied, it’s all still there, but the sting is diminished. From now on, when I recall that moment on the playground, I can look down at my rope wrapped up in my small hands and smile.