Not Fade Away: A Memoir of Senses Lost and Found Read Online Free Page A

the ceremonial dance performances and chants, the men in their beautiful headdresses moving to the beat of their powerful drums. I loved how different the colors were from those of Oakland and Berkeley, with their heavily paved roads and towering trees of eucalyptus, oak, and redwood. Here, the backdrop for the bright colors and stones was the subtler colors of the Southwest, earth tones of adobe, purple, and brown.
    In the evening I would sit on the porch swing, with Grandma’s dog, Tilly, a loyal German shepherd mix rescue dog, at my feet. I would absently stroke her with my toes as I watched the sun set in a brilliant wash of orange, red, and purple, and as the evening breeze picked up, the bells on Grandma’s porch would start chiming. The bells and the sunset and Tilly’s warm body beneath my feet filled me with so much joy.
    The last time I remember seeing a sky full of stars was on one of those visits, when I was nine or ten years old. Once the sun had set, and the dark had brought in the chill, we would bundle up in our sweatshirts and sit outside of her little adobe house and look up at the universe filled with tiny pinpricks of light, the whole sky ours to see.
    Today I live in Manhattan, where no one is able to see the stars anyway—but whenever I’m lucky enough to be in a place where they’re visible, I’m sometimes able to see the very brightest ones. One, or sometimes two if I’m really lucky, though whomever I’m with assures me, when I ask, that the sky is full of them,twinkling diamonds in an inky-black sky. And this comforts, rather than distresses, me. To be able to see just one makes me so happy. I can still see a star, millions of miles away! The sky is still full of them, I have enough vision to see one, and my imagination can fill in the rest. Someday, I’ll have to rely on my memory to conjure them, but I will have taken the time to look, and to be grateful.
    For me, there are so many experiences that are limited or already gone, and so many more will be—some very soon—that it is impossible not to feel lucky now, while I still have them. I think that I am probably more grateful for that one star than I would be if I were fully sighted, looking at a whole sky shining withthem.

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    M y brothers and I all remember our family, and our childhood, as an idyllic one. We were always close, physically affectionate, rolling on top of one another like puppies, fighting to see who could be the wittiest, be the funniest, get the most attention. My mother would come home after a full day of work and cook us a homemade meal, sing to us, and play the piano, and coordinated our busy schedules to and from soccer and basketball practice and piano lessons. My father was loud, funny, and gregarious. He was tall and muscular, and when we were younger the three of us used to beg him to pick us all up at once and try to carry us around. There was nothing that frightened me more than when he raised his voice in anger at us, a rare event, but one that I dreaded. Our parents looked beautiful together, and I loved to look at pictures of the five of us hung around the house, my father next to my mother, dwarfing her, with his huge hand resting on her tiny shoulder, Peter, Danny, and I in front, grinning. I would run my fingers along the glass, stopping to restthe tip of one on each tiny face, and know with an absolute certainty that we were a perfect family.
    The night my parents told us they were getting separated we had sat down to an early dinner, so used to my parents’ strained conversation at this point that we barely noticed their silence as we chattered on about our day, talking over one another. They told us that after dinner we needed to go up to their room so that we could have a family meeting. We never had family meetings, and I remember nervously looking back and forth between my parents, who sat at either end of the kitchen table, not looking at us or at one another, trying to imagine what they