Carmen McRae With Summer Memory

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2007

Sitting at my desk, I am listening to Carmen McRae and thinking about a time past.

I heard a therapist repeat a phrase that felt like she had said over and over to many clients. "The future is anxiety, the past is depression." Naturally, in her milieu, she would say such a thing. A therapist deals with anxieties and depressions, and neuroses and psychosis, all day long. But the future and past might just be expressions that are descriptive of when something might or might not have occurred.

Almost anything seems to evoke or provoke memory or thought in me.

Listening to Carmen McRae I was reminded of a scene of summer in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Why do the cool urbane tones of McRae remind me of this rural mind-photo? The possibility exists that when this particular scene etched itself on my memory, I had been listening to her inside my house and wandered outside, and there before my eyes were California liveoak trees and sere summer grass, bleached almost transparent by the heat. There is also, directly in front of me, the gate my father had built into our front pasture. My father was not fond of new technology and never owned a credit card, or an ATM card. He didn't want an "efficient" fence, he seemed to want to reach for a kind of esthetic, so when he built the fence, he did not buy metal posts and a post driver, and then build what was then called sheep fencing. Sheep fencing consisted of wires woven into four or five inch squares and then topped with two or three strands of barbed wire. Our fence was a throwback.

My father dug each post hole with a digger that resembled two individual shovels hinged together like a scissors. He then bought irregularly shaped cedar posts soaked in creosote and positioned them in the holes so that a somewhat flat face could hold and receive four strands of barbed wire running parallel and held with "staples", which were really double ended nails bent into a u-shape and pounded into each post over the strands of wire. We had a neighbor who seemed to like spending more time at our house than at his own, which had picture windows and a swimming pool and evidently a nagging wife; anyway, the neighbor once asked my father why he hadn't done it the "easy" way. My father gave one of his mysterious, laconically styled responses that was calculated to tell an asker that they had just asked a question that was, stupid, irrelevant, pointless, none of their business, and at the same time, gave them a definite sense that my father was a rugged individualist right out of the wild west. It was very effective.

But the real answer was that what he had was what he wanted. But that isn't the point of this. I was speaking about the gate. This gate, unlike our corral gate, three wooden bars which slid to the side to open, consisted of a relatively straight tree branch to which were wound the strands of barbed wire. The bottom of the branch was fitted into a loop of bailing wire and then pulled into a vertical position and a another loop of bailing wire was slid over the top of the branch. This very old-fashioned kind of gate, my father told me, was called a "California gate". I have often wondered if in Nebraska it might be called a Nebraska gate, but the thought that it had originated in California seemed special to me. It made it seem to contain special energy because it was labelled Californian.

But why when I am listening to Carmen McRae, a quintessential New Yorker, was I reminded of summer in California?

I suppose there might be something in the sound of her voice, a horn being blown through sand, that starts a lightening chain of associations leading bio-electrical impulses down some meandering synaptic course until, at last, they arrive at a summer scene in the Sierra Nevada foothills stored in an old brain closet. Maybe it is just my current mood or something I have eaten or seen out of the corner of my eye. There is an image in memory and whatever has caused it to appear is welcome. The image may indeed, be false. But it is there.

With the sound of Carmen McRae's voice moving below a pale blue burning sky, I see the trees, shining spiked green leaves, grass, yellow-gold from heat, fine yellow dust that only a whisper of a breeze will lift into clouds to cloak the grass and the trees.

And I see the California gate.