Four years. A college career. A presidential term.

After a year, two years, even three, a moment, an event is still close at hand, in use, unfiled, but after four years, it’s crossing over — from a thing remembered to A Memory, official and formal, tinted a polite brown, a place in the mind that is visited, a place for inside voices and a low heel.

After four years, things get lost. Weight gets lost. Four years ago, I wore a size 14. I still ate meat then, and I had a broken heart as well…or bruised, really, I guess, but either way, I applied a poultice of lemon cookies, hundreds of them, eaten in bed while reading Wharton and feeling by turns furious and pathetic. Four years ago, I had a pair of black corduroys that I probably wore five days out of seven, that hit my boot tops just so and flattened my cookie-belly out. Four years ago, I loved a pair of pants, and it loved me back, but then the pants stopped fitting and I gave them away. Who knows who’s wearing them now.

Four years ago, I had a car, a charcoal-grey two-door Accord named Shadow with automatic seatbelts and a rusting-out driver’s side door. I knew just how many miles she’d get to a tank, just how many bags I could fit in the trunk, just how to curl up in the back seat for a nap, just how to hook her into the space behind Wing and Glark’s back gate. My dad sold the car to a girl we know a few years back, and sometimes I imagine Shadow in my hometown, parked next to the post office or in front of our church, even rustier, the stickers of a dozen years scraped off, but who knows where she is now. I don’t know if she even runs anymore. Or how, or where.

Four years ago, I had a book I’d found on the search wire, back when I used to work in a bookstore. The book is a Princeton handbook from 1905, so it’s not a crappy So You’re A Terrified Freshman-style paperback; it’s a proper book, bound, with cloth covers and incredibly detailed captions like “Fig. 3.4: Beanie.” A hundred years ago, Princeton freshmen wore beanies and said things like, “Why, that’s capital!” and their valets could still use the dumbwaiters in Patton Hall. Who knows when they turned the dumbwaiter shafts into closets. Who knows what became of that book. Four years is four moves ago, and every time, a few things go missing or get broken, or it’s the night before the truck comes and I don’t care anymore and I throw a handful of books and my Lou Gehrig giveaway statuette in with the Christmas decorations and forget to mark the side of the box. I know what it looks like, that book, and where it used to sit, which shelf I had it on, but now it’s gone.

Years pass, and you can’t keep everything with you. Cars rust. Phone numbers get spilled on, shoes get lent out, pictures fall down behind your desk. A clasp breaks, a pendant falls off, and it’s nothing you’d have had insured; it’s a thing that insured you, a talisman from someone you love or who used to love you or who’s in Portland on business until Thursday, and you don’t notice it gone in time, and when you go back, it’s not there, swept up at three in the morning, a wink in the dustpan and then out with the trash and who knows where that trash is now. You try to keep everything with you, but you can’t. Things will get lost. So many things get lost.

Four years ago, I had a guy named Don. Don is a man I met in the Bank of New York on September 11, 2001 at about 10 in the morning. When I introduced myself to Don, I had to shout over the squeal of the fire alarm. We stayed together until he got on a ferry back to New Jersey, and I haven’t seen him since. Don is starting to get lost — his face, his voice, things we said, places we stood. Don isn’t a thing, of course, to rust through or fade or loosen; Don is out there somewhere, checking the new watch he got for his birthday yesterday, or jamming his finger installing a car seat, or buying a latte. But Don is the thing that insured me, a talisman of familiar grace I didn’t know I had on. It’s still there.

September 12, 2005

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