The Dime in the Cement

I like to think I have a pretty impressive long-term memory.

Mercifully, my teens went by in a dizzy blur, but much of my toddlerhood and early childhood is with me still.

I can remember standing in the kitchen, watching my father fiddling around at the stove, trying to make scrambled eggs in a skillet my mother never used. He was wearing a pale blue terrycloth bathrobe and he was terribly crabby; the scrambled eggs he made were watery and raggedy, and my sister and I refused to eat them and he got cross. Not long after, my mother came into the room with a blue blanket and something white sticking out of the top: my baby sister's cotton-candy, eiderdown hair. I was just over a year old.

I can remember the rows of books in book cases, the chipped varnish on the wood, the thin film of dust on top of the shabby books with their peeling bindings; the sharpness of the grass in our front yard, the yearning I had for the New York subway that my older sister insisted ran directly under our sleepy, dusty Southern Californian street.

I remember walking home from school when I was in kindergarten: I saw a small boy try to hit a cat with a hoe; the cat gave the boy a good raking with its claws and I felt like cheering as the boy ran bawling into his house.

Half a dozen houses down from us, there was a house with a bright red mailbox out in front: the mailbox appeared to be supported by a large, thick, curving chain. I could never figure this out: it appeared so counterintuitive that I would stand and stare in awe every time I passed the mailbox. One day, my older sister showed me that the mailbox support, though cleverly constructed to look like a chain, was actually a lot of fused bits. I pretended that this wasn't the case: I would still stare at the chain every time I passed and tell myself that it was standing up all of its own accord, a regular phenomenon.

There was a dime imbedded in the concrete of our cousins' patio next door; my sisters and I were driven near to distraction trying to get it out and would lie awake at night concocting plots on how best to do this. One night I remember fearing that we might actually do it: we would manage to prise the dime out of the cement, spend it on something extravagant like a large Hershey's chocolate bar with almonds -- and then what? After we had eaten the chocolate, the dime would be gone: all that would be left would be a ragged hole in an endless expanse of ugly grey concrete. Lying there in the dark next to my still-scheming sister, I was seized with the hope that we would never, ever manage to get that dime out of its concrete bed and lose the wonderful promise of a treasure to come.

Many decades later, on a rare trip back to our old neighborhood in LaPuente, my younger sister and I saw the mailbox on its improbable chain support, our old house -- looking very much the same -- and the bunch of low shrubs under which the New York subway had once, I had been assured, rumbled and rushed to exotic, sophisticated destinations I could barely imagine.

We got out of the car and walked around the neighborhood, but we didn't want to bother the new owners; we never checked to see if the dime was still in the cement.

I'm so glad I don't know whether it's still there or not. In my mind, it is.