I Remember You

I Remember You

Noel Laflin

5-9-20

Ray Bradbury wrote a poem entitled “Remembrance’ nearly fifty years ago. I know it was that long ago because my mother spotted it in a magazine, carefully clipped it out, and mailed it to me while I was working at summer camp back in the early 1970’s. There was just a brief note attached saying that I’d probably like this poem.

And I did.

It’s a story about a middle aged man who returns to his old home town, sees the house, in which he was born and raised, then traverses the old ravine that he and his brother used to explore some forty years before, spots a tree that he recalls climbing as a kid, and decides to climb it again.

High in the tree, and clinging on for dear life, he discovers a hole in a large branch that looks familiar. Recalling a distant memory, he reaches into the hole and finds a faded folded piece of notebook paper, creased forever – paper he remembers quite well, and handwriting that he recognizes as his own, albeit a lifetime ago. On the paper are just six words: ‘I remember you, I remember you.’

There was something in that poem that my mom instinctively knew would appeal to me, just as it did to her apparently.

Thus, with Mother’s Day fast approaching, I take down that old, carefully clipped-out poem, the one that has been residing in a frame on the same wall for nearly forty years, look for creases that were made by the loving hands of a woman (younger by a decade then, than I am now), so that it would fit into an envelope and find its way to her young man away for the summer, exploring trees and ravines of his own - long, long ago - and repeat the words: ‘I remember you, I remember you.’