Memory

At work I sat staring at the screen in front of me. It displayed a cryptic-looking map file, telling me in its arcane way why not all of my program was loading into RAM like I expected it to. But before figuring out my problem, I became lost in a recollection of a faraway memory.

I'm about seven years old. I'm stopped, straddling my bike atop the levee that serves as the perimeter for the subdivision I live in. I'm looking out, away from the neighborhood, over a barbwire fence upon a cow pasture that borders the prison farm less than a mile farther away. I'm looking at a dilapidated shack in the pasture, maybe a little more than a hundred meters from the levee. I'm alone.

I'm stopped because I came upon a parked ATV and a couple of dirt bikes lying on their sides, kickstands unused. At the shack in the pasture is a small group of boys, playing. They're a few years older than me. They're doing what boys typically do when playing, which this day amounts to trying to destroy the shack piece by piece. I'm watching the boys.

Within minutes, one boy within the group sees me. He calls an alert, which grabs the others' attention. One of them shouts something discernible enough only to communicate its aggression, and they all begin running towards me. Immediate panic grips me. I'm outnumbered, and there are no adults anywhere around. I know only enough to flee. I take off on my bicycle in a spasm, legs pumping furiously, every fiber of me iced in fear. Home lies a ways down the levee and then through a short maze of turns on suburban streets—in total, about a mile away. I look behind me only to see the boys continuing to run towards their bikes and ATV on the levee. The rusted, tangly fence in their way will slow them down only so much. Machine power and age difference make this an unfair pursuit. As I quickly speed down the steep slope of the levee and into the vacant lot to cut back to the streets, I hear the ATV start up. I jump the curb out onto the street and ride as fast as I can over the smooth cement of the road. As I ride, the sound of the ATV becomes louder as my head start in this terrifying race begins to vanish. I'm not far enough to lose them blindly around a turn. I doubt that I will make it home fast enough, but I don't dare stop trying.

It is only with the insight as an adult looking back at this episode that I realize that those boys were probably as afraid of catching me as I was of being caught. Probably it is that fact that best explains how I was able to arrive safely home and avoid being overtaken. I rode up the driveway, discarding my bike in the garage, and fled inside through the back door. This was when our house was new, so new that my dad had not yet put up the privacy wooden fence in the backyard.

I remember this little fact about the fence because another day, maybe a week later, maybe a month, I was still able to look with an unobstructed view from our backyard into the vacant lots behind. At this time, my parents were in the backyard with me, busy transforming their bit of earth closer to their American dream one shovelful at a time. I don't remember what I was doing, but I remember the same fear welling up inside me as I heard the rumble of an ATV approach on the streets on the other side as those vacant lots. It was the same group of boys.

The one riding atop the ATV jumped the curb into the vacant lots and began riding back and forth, avoiding the overgrown weeds and brush. He looked menacingly toward me. They all did. I ran to my parents nearby. I can only imagine how I sounded to them as I, not the clearest of communicators at that age, blubbered with frantic fear and tugged at their arms with desperation. I must not have gotten across to them my point that the boys who happened to be riding around in the lots were clearly out to get me in a bad way. Not getting that delicate point across, my parents may have wondered why I was suddenly so upset. But they did nothing except try to get me to calm down. Eventually the older boys left. I never saw them again, though I worried about them for many months afterward.

By now, my silent, internal narrative of this one childhood memory has autonomously subsided back into the enigmatic recesses of the mind whence it came, and my eyes pull back into focus upon the hex digits of code and data addresses in the map file open on my laptop screen.

Where do these flashbacks come from? The mind is remarkable.