"They Came Back"

I am sitting on a gentle snowy slope.  I am probably three or four years old.  The slope is bare of anything except snow -- and the little sapling tree that I am sitting next to and holding on to.  I sense things whizzing by me on each side.  Maybe I am cold, but maybe not, thickly bundled in a snowsuit that makes it hard to move my arms and legs.  I start crying, then stand up and stumble away from the little tree.  Onto the slope.  Where am I?  Where is Dad?

Then he’s next to me.  Breathless and with a cold face.  His plaid cap with visor and ear flaps and his gray loden coat with the toggle horn-clasps.  He’s got a little sled under one arm.  With the other arm, he scoops me up and says, “I told you to stay by the tree and hold on!  You were safe there!”

It is many years later that I realize that my thirty-ish father had taken me sledding at a park somewhere in Queens, near where we lived.  Mom would have been back home at the apartment with my younger brothers, a toddler and an infant.

And this young father had taken his little girl sledding. 

Maybe he was giving his wife a break.  Maybe she knew that he needed a break.  Maybe the atmosphere in the cramped apartment had gotten oppressive.  Maybe he’d been told to get out and give her some peace.  Maybe he’d stormed out. 

Maybe he got tired of shepherding a little girl.  Maybe he just wanted one single solitary run of speed down that hill.  A reprise of a time before wife and kids.  So, he grabbed my sled and left me where I would be safe -- no one would run into me if I stayed near the little tree -- and what did I do?

It is many years later that I tell Dad about this memory.  I’m not sure why I did.  Because I thought I had been abandoned?  But I hadn’t been.  Dad didn’t react or augment my memory in any way.  He did tell me that he had a similar memory from a similar age of being told by his mother to sit “right there” on a bench in front of a store because she would be “right back”.  So, he waited and waited and waited.  She did come back.