When I was young, I had a fantasy that as an infant, I had somehow been switched—by a wild and convoluted set of circumstances that I never went to the trouble of trying to contrive—with Prince Edward. Yes, that Prince Edward, the Earl of Wessex, the youngest son of the Queen of England (and Canada and Australia and all sorts of other places around the globe). The fact that his name was Edward and that we’re about the same age made the fantasy seem more plausible than any of the other switched-at-birth scenarios I could come up with. I hoped that some day the mistake would be rectified and I would get to go live in a castle and ride polo ponies and go to Cambridge and be third in the line of succession to the English crown. I let go of that fantasy long before Edward was demoted to seventh in line by the births of his nieces and nephews and became as bald and dorky as all of his male relatives. You only have to look at a photograph to know without a doubt that he’s Prince Charles’s little brother.

So it turned out that I’m just the youngest son of Jim and Jean Gumnick, and every time I look in the mirror, I see a little more of Dad.

As far as I know, our ethnic heritages or national origins include Polish, Austro-Hungarian, French-German (Alsatian, woof!), and Irish with maybe a touch of Pennsylvania Dutch thrown in. We can’t claim any royalty, nobility, or even commoners of great distinction in our bloodlines. But I think one of the birthrights of Americans of mixed ancestry should be the right to claim anyone you like as one of your ancestors—whether by genes, by culture, or just by affinity. And so I claim descent from Genghis Khan by way of his first grandson, Orda Khan, who invaded Poland in the thirteenth century. It’s entirely possible that he left behind some Mongol-Polish offspring, and I credit the Khan genes for my natural talent for leadership and my propensity for cross-cultural communication.

Culturally, I consider myself a descendant of Leonardo Da Vinci. He was creative, imaginative, left-handed, at least a little bit crazy, and is reported to have had a weakness for men much younger than himself. A man after mine own heart. I think I will start referring to him as “my uncle Leonardo.”

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick

I should ask Dad about that old car. What was the model? How long did he drive it? I think he sold it for scrap when I was about eight.

I almost couldn’t believe it, but Dad said that he was the one who drove on my first day of school. He says my mother was riding in the back seat, and since it was my special day, I was up front next to him. He wasn’t sure what car I was talking about. I’m going to ask Larry what he remembers.

Larry is sure that the car with the tan interior was a Chevy Impala. “It was forest green, and it was what they called a ‘hardtop.’ That means that when you rolled down both windows on the same side, you had one huge open space that went from the post next to the front windshield all the way back to the little triangular window next to the back seat. That car was a monster!”

“I’ll have to take your word for it.” Larry was always a car guy. He went on to tell me a long story about taking seven friends to the beach in that car the summer he got his driver’s license.

Dad called this morning to tell me he’d found a photo of the Chevy, but it was blue, not green. I called Larry back, and he said, “Oh, yeah, my friend Billy drove a forest green car. I think it might have been a Caprice.”

I told him what had gotten me started asking about the car, about my crystal-clear memory of that fall morning at Emerson Elementary.

“Hm. You’re six years behind me in school, so you would have started kindergarten in, what? 1980?”

“Yeah, that math seems to work.”

“Then Dad was driving a white Oldsmobile with a red interior,” Larry said. “He never let Mom drive that car. He said it was too big for her to handle, but it was really just because that car was his baby. And when—”

I thought maybe the line had gone dead. “Are you still there?” I said to the silent line.

“Yeah, sorry. I was just thinking. The tan interior. Mom in the front seat, the way she kept one hand on the steering wheel even when she was sitting in a parking lot. Dude, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I think you’re remembering my first day of school.”

My inspiration for what to do with the line was a podcast I listened to today. It was a 2006 story about “stolen” memories—a phenomenon wherein people appropriate memories they’ve heard from others, or to which they were merely witnesses, and incorporate the recollections into their own personal narratives. (Read more about “stolen” memories.)

So I decided to attempt a story about the unreliability of memory. Or maybe this actually happened. I forget.

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick

Their house was the fourth from the bottom of the row—fourth on the right as you climbed the street in the front, fourth from the left as you climbed the alley in the back. In the back, the outbuildings were landmarks to find our way into the correct backyard through a gate in the low chain link fence. All the fences on Mommom and Granddad’s street were of the same height, as if someone had started putting up fences at one end and worked their way up the alley. Most of the yards had clotheslines; my grandparents had rose bushes, too, and a garden hose and sprinkler.

From the front, you had to find the house by more subtle signs. All of the houses were of red brick and white-washed concrete, and all of the porches had the same open brickwork front railings. Mommom and Granddad’s house was marked by rectangular, whitewashed ceramic planters that were always filled with stinky red geraniums. The porches ran together in a row, ascending the street, separated by low concrete dividers that an adult could step over. A child could sit on the little wall and swing one leg over at a time. On one side, you could walk to the neighbor’s porch by way of the shared landing at the top of the conjoined concrete staircases on either side. Mommom and Granddad shared their staircase with Miss Elizabeth and Miss Marie. Miss Elizabeth was friendly but stern with a surprising old-lady mustache and fierce eyebrows. Miss Marie had wispy white hair. She was older, very kind and sweet. She would invite us in and offer sugar cookies from a tin, but only if she knew that Mommom was away from home or busy somewhere else in the house.

Granddad had whitewashed the planter boxes to match the concrete face of the basement wall, below where the bricks started. Many years later, I stripped the white paint off of one of those planters to find a glaze of gingerbread brown with a wash of green highlighting the ivy pattern wound around the top.

This piece of art has been a fixture in my life for so long that I don’t remember any details of its creation. I have to imagine my parents, who would have been somewhat younger than the age I am now, hunched over the brown-and-white Formica kitchen table, sorting the tiny tiles and organizing them into rows. I picture Dad arranging the chaotic blocks of solid color that represent the buildings while Mom patiently laid out the orderly pattern of the sky. You can see a little wavering in the neat rows where the two sections of the composition come together. Maybe they miscalculated how many rows it would take to meet in the middle, or maybe one of them was fitting the tiles more closely together than the other. In any case, they found some way to make it work as a single consistent picture.

The City isn’t remarkable as a work of art. I keep it because the colors are pleasing and because my parents made it with their own hands. I also like that it seems outdated, a little retro, and that it gently connects me to every house I ever lived in with my parents. I think there’s something written on the back in pencil in my father’s handwriting, a date perhaps, but the mosaic is heavy and I don’t want to take it off the wall to remind myself what it says. I look forward to being pleasantly surprised by that writing again some day—or not—when I have occasion to take it off its hook, maybe to take it to the next place I will live.

I also display it because I like mosaic as an art form, so it’s kind of cool to have not one but TWO pieces in this unusual medium in my room. (I’ll tell you about The Fishies at a later date, perhaps.) My fondness for mosaic might be associated with my Rome fetish. The Romans were masters of the mosaic form at several stages of their history. At the ancient port city of Ostia Antica, a town that was abandoned 18 centuries ago because of the silting-up of the Tiber river, entire mosaic floors were preserved under the mud. They’ve been excavated now, and some of them are still in such good condition that visitors are permitted to walk on them. In the heart of Rome, pieces of intact mosaic floors are visible here and there throughout the Imperial Forum. This stuff could last forever.

A few weeks ago, I went to the Museum of Fine Arts to see an exhibit about Pompeii. One of the artifacts on display was a beautiful piece of mosaic floor. A simple design made of tiles somewhat smaller than the ones my parents used surrounded a central mosaic medallion of much tinier tesserae that depicted the Gorgon Medusa. A plaque on the wall explained the technique. The central medallion was designed to be removable so that if the owner moved to a new home, he could take the finer, more expensive part of the artwork with him.

I’m trying to imagine the house I’m sitting in as it might look if it were undisturbed by human activity for 20 or 30 centuries. If some catastrophe or sudden change in economic or demographic factors should drive us away from here, and assuming that climate change doesn’t send Houston once again to the bottom of a giant inland sea, how long would The City survive? Exposed to the elements, the wooden frame and backing would probably disappear in just a few decades. But it doesn’t seem unreasonable to imagine that the tiles themselves, and with a little luck, the mortar that holds them together, might survive.

What might some future anthropologists think of my parents’ cityscape? What stories might they make up to explain its meaning and its historical significance? What will it tell some future museum-goers about our culture and beliefs? I like to think about leaving The City for them. I’m sure some of them will like it.

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick

I wake up in my bed in the room we shared. I look around me in the darkness. I can see the three windows, filled with starlight and street lights. There is more light out there, on the shingles of the roof outside the windows, more light on the lawn that slopes away toward the valley. It is most dark inside the house, but this room isn’t the darkest.

Everything is there as we left it. The huge old radio sits on the dresser we shared. His big desk, my smaller one. His piled with books I couldn’t understand, with magazines, with the tools and supplies for his fly-tying, with pieces of leather and electrical components that I couldn’t identify. My desk has only an orderly row of books standing between two plain wooden L bookends. They are fiction—dog-eared paperbacks and thrift-store third editions of second-rate spy thrillers, science fiction, ghost stories.

I know that I cannot hide in the closet. That’s the first place he’ll look. That was always the first place he looked, and everyone had to learn that hard lesson once. I contemplate the attic door. He has to stoop to go through it, but I don’t. But I don’t know what I will find behind the small door. Will it be as we left it, packed from the center aisle below the peak of the roof all the way out to the eaves with moldering cardboard boxes and bug-infested baskets of old linens, broken toys, strands of Christmas lights, and outdated appliances? It used to be a maze of hiding places and a source of unexpected treasures. But this is a dream. Might I open the door to find the attic empty, and hear his footsteps in the hall outside our bedroom door? Will the bare bulb that hangs halfway between the door and the outer wall of the house be lighted, or will I have to feel my way carefully across the plywood sheets, reaching for the chain that hangs somewhere before me in the dark? No, I should not have wasted these moments considering the attic.

I climb out of the bed. In this dream, I am always surprised again to find how short my legs are. In my waking life, I cannot remember being small. It seems to me that I was always big, and strong, and if not an object of fear, at least imposing enough to avoid most physical confrontations. But my short legs—they are thin, too, not the sturdy pillars into which they would grow—my short legs barely reach the floor. I feel the carpet. Even in the dark, I remember its shades of brown and gold. I tiptoe to the door and press my ear against it. Nothing. He is not in the hallway. I think I would be able to hear his breathing. I pull the door open, taking care to keep the hinges from squeaking or the knob from banging against the wall.

In the faint glow of the nightlight coming from the open door of the bathroom, there is no sign of him in the hallway or in the open door of my parents’ bedroom at the far end. The other doors are all closed. He could be behind any of them. But that is not his usual game.

I keep to the wall on my right, from where I’ll have the best view into the bathroom and the open bedroom door. When I am outside the bathroom, I drop to my knees. I reach out and place the palm of my right hand on the cool linoleum. I know somehow that he is not in the bathroom. I draw back my hand and think about the space underneath the vanity. I could fit in there. I think of the warm, wet smell, and now I can almost smell it. No, not there.

He wouldn’t go in my parents’ bedroom. I know he wouldn’t. He pretends to have no respect for authority, and I think he is afraid of nothing, but we have been given a few rules, and he knows that we are not allowed in there when Mom and Dad aren’t home.

I wonder for a moment where they are. In the dream I cannot remember that one of them is two thousand miles from here and the other has been gone for 15 years. I am too young to think about these things.

I make my way down the stairs, careful to walk only on the ends of the treads where the nails are. Walking on the well-worn middle path makes squeaks and pops that you can hear from the front porch. Fourteen steps. I have to be more careful now. There is no nightlight in the downstairs hall. We aren’t supposed to go downstairs during the night. The curtains are drawn, and in this dream, there is never a light burning from my father’s study at the back corner of the house, and my mother is never in the kitchen making a cup of chamomile tea before bed.

I am quick to move away from the vulnerable open position at the foot of the stairs. Around the end of the banister to the left, there’s a small space next to the telephone table. I fit in this space, and in the deep darkness, no one can see my pale legs or the light-blue cotton of my summer pajamas. I wait here a few moments. It is always while I pause here that I realize that as much as I don’t want to do it, I must go into the basement.

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick

The brown and smoky tones of the card remind me of a photo of M. from his service during the first Gulf War. He served as a specialist in the U.S. Army stationed in Saudi Arabia and worked with communications equipment during the liberation of Kuwait and the advance into Iraq. He’s told me stories of his service in that war—of the Russian tanks used by the Iraqi Army, which became useless piles of molten plastic and metal under American artillery fire. He talks infrequently about one of the few times that he himself was under fire, laughing off the experience.

“We just ran away!” he jokes. I have to imagine the details he leaves out—the noise, the smoke, the omnipresent dust, the thunder of air cover as our Air Force drove back the Iraqi assault with a disproportionate counter-attack. I admire the casual shape his courage takes. I cannot imagine being fired upon. I was never tempted to sign up for military service.

El Soldado’s murky background makes me think of the oil wells that the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, ordered set on fire. Some burned for many months before well-fire experts could put out all the fires and get the Kuwaiti wells back into production. M. has experienced some health issues—worrisome, but so far, not serious—that I’m inclined to blame on smoke from the well fires, or toxic ordnance, or maybe on the experimental vaccines that were tested on Gulf War soldiers. He dismisses my suspicions, preferring to blame his quirky liver on his intemperate youth.

In the photo, M. sits in the back seat of a jeep. He’s wearing desert camouflage, with a floppy camo hat of the style I usually associate with fishermen. His eyes, heavy-lidded and -lashed, always have a sleepy look, but in the photo, they’re squinted even more tightly against the desert sun, which washes all colors in the photo to dull browns, olives, tans, and beiges. His skinny frame accentuates his aquiline nose. His skin is walnut-brown from weeks or months of exposure to relentless Saudi Arabian sunshine. A thin adolescent mustache and the way his uniform hangs off him remind me that he had barely outgrown boyhood when he volunteered for service, received basic and specialist training, and was shipped around the world to fight for our Kuwaiti allies’ freedom—and oil.

Who is El Soldado? What acts of heroism does he shyly dismiss as duty, as cowardice? What horrors of war are preserved behind his stoic expression?

Even though many of my readers know M.’s identity, I’ve decided to conceal it here to protect his privacy (at least a little) from the general public.