Echoes of the Past

By Joe Broadmeadow

Somewhere in the last decade my dreams stopped running with visuals. The projector died and the audio kept running. Now I sleep inside a radio that only plays reruns.

Nothing happens in them. There is no plot. Nobody falls, nothing chases me, and my teeth stay where I left them. There is only talk. Fragments of conversations from thirty, forty, or sixty years ago played back out of order in the original voices, with the original background noise. A screen door on a spring. Somebody yelling for me to run after one of my rare moments of contact with a pitch. A discussion with a friend at three in the morning as we sat next to each other in our cruisers in the middle of a blizzard.

I have come to understand that there is a clerk in my head, and that the clerk is not good at his job.

He cannot retrieve the name of a man I worked beside for eleven years. He has no idea where I set down my glasses, and he has never once known why I walked into the kitchen. But he has preserved, in pristine broadcast quality, a jingle for a grocery store on Route 2 that went out of business before I could drive and the entire text of an argument about whether Lite Beer will ever catch on. (I said no.)

He is also the custodian of the full-name summons. My mother used a cascading list of my names, each with its own implied level of seriousness. Joey, Joe, Joseph. If she added the last name, my heart rate would soar. Even now, asleep, sixty years on, some animal part of me sits up and starts building an alibi.

“Get in this house. Now.”
My mother, through the screen door, 1963. I am already running, and I still do not know what I did, and it is a long list.

“You’ll write a thousand reports in this job. The only ones you’ll remember are the ones you rushed.”
My training officer, in a cruiser that smelled of vinyl, cigarettes, and coffee left on the burner since the day shift.

“Is this a long story? Because I just started dinner.”
My wife. Every year of the marriage. Roughly weekly.

“Tell my sister I was reading the Bible when you got here.”
A friend, hospital bed, eleven days out. He was watching golf.

“Grandfather, were you born before color or after? What kind of a phone did you have when you were in school?”
My grandson, age five, asking in complete sincerity.

That last one gets replayed more than the others, and I suspect the clerk enjoys it.

·   ·   ·

Twenty years of interviews taught me one durable thing about human beings, and it wasn’t about lying. It was this: people do not remember what they said. They remember what they meant.

Every subject in every interview room, guilty or innocent or just unlucky, gave me the improved version, and most of them weren’t even aware they were doing it. The gap between what a person said and what he meant is where nearly all the trouble in the world is born.

Dreams do not permit that edit. Dreams play the raw audio.

So, the archive holds a lot of things I would not have selected. The last conversation I had with my father was about nothing when it should have been about us both recognizing the time we wasted out of stubbornness. The stubbornness persisted despite our efforts. Nobody hands you a warning that a closing argument is coming, and so nobody makes one. The recording does not care that you wanted something better. The tape only has what was on it.

I would trade the grocery store jingle, in full, with the phone number sung at the end, for thirty more seconds of my father saying anything at all. The clerk declines. He does not take requests. I believe he is in a union.

·   ·   ·

Here is the part that has begun to unsettle me. Lately I hear my own voice in the mix.

Not the good stuff. Not the things I worked on, the advice I sharpened for years, or the lines I was rather proud of at the time. What comes back is the throwaway. Something I said in a driveway with a bag of mulch in my arms. Something I said at a stoplight. The stray, unconsidered sentence that landed in somebody else’s permanent collection without either of us noticing the light was on.

Which means that years from now, a man in his seventies, who was once my five-year-old grandson, is going to doze off in a chair, and he is going to hear me. And there is a very good chance I will be saying something about a fish, a very big fish, as I recall.

You do not get to choose what gets kept. That’s the whole design of the thing. But you do get a vote on what goes into the room in the first place, and the recorder, as it turns out, is always running.

So, I say the good things out loud now. Not speeches. Speeches are for people who think they’ll be given notice. Just the plain, small, slightly embarrassing sentences, delivered while everybody involved is still in the room to hear them. Last week I told my grandsons I was proud of them. They both said okay, asked for a popsicle, then left the room at a dead run.

Doesn’t matter. It’s on the tape.