Jackets

In the event of a house fire, I would reach for the following items before climbing out my window or army crawling to the door:

1. My grandfather’s Harley jacket, his ruby bike embroidered on the back in coarse thread by my grandmother’s hand.

2. Her father’s World War II bomber jacket from Shang Hai, Bud Hudson inscribed above the left chest pocket in the same striking red as his son-in-law’s stitched bike, Chinese ladies mingling about their gardens on the pocket image below. It’s reversible—blue or black silk—with swirling parade dragons scaling the backs. Busted buttons. Creased cuffs.

3. His wife’s pearl necklace, orb swallowed halfway in titanium waves. I don’t know if it’s real or not. The chain leans over itself in a continuous swirl.

If I had more time, probably my letterbox and laptop, but we don’t always get more time. Not to reach for the framed portrait, not to see if a sister made it out her respective window. Why lunge for items and not people? I don’t know. Maybe in an actual house fire, I’d carry out third-degree burns and grayed lungs from rushing to rescue my mother. Or maybe I grab the jackets and necklace once belonging to ancestors dead or dying, and I leave with what of them I can still salvage. People die.

Grandpa with the Harley turned 73 on September 2nd. He has some years left and probably bought himself more with the alcohol-and-red-meat detox he conquered in 2015. Bud is dead. He survived the war but smashed into a semi on May 22, 1975. He was small, like me. His bomber fits well. My great-grandma accuses us of pushing her down stairwells from her fragmented dream-mirages. She wears life alert, though she swears she’ll never use it. It’s thorny to mourn someone who barely exists anymore. It’s wiser to put on their memory via cloak and remember what of their best can squeeze into the threads.

I can’t save these people, fading into a son’s guest wing in Orlando, raking into muddied cemetery plots—but I can preserve. I can imagine great-grandma rouging her cheeks with a pearl resting on her collar bone. She can be 40 again, scrubbing the bathtub, jazzercizing, carving an Easter ham. Or she could at least be 82, shaking as she pours my Lucky Charms into a ceramic white mug, hushing me because her program is on.

And the one I never knew? There’s curiosity there. I wonder what it’s like to piss away your family with a spiked blood-alcohol content and a manual transmission. I also wonder what it’s like to recognize that dark terror, however delayed, that you’re not making it home; you’re signing off in the front grates of a semi with the lighting bugs smeared between slats. And all your not-yet-existent granddaughter will know of you is your affection for booze, your cantankerous swank, your Chinese bomber jacket, and your hastened Winslow, Illinois, obituary.

There’s more: the “awesome dad” shirt first seen in 2002 photo albums, stained, now cropped, then worn by a less-than-awesome dad. A slew of button-downs, ranging in ownership from father to stepfather to grandmother to friends. Jeans hemmed to shorts from Christine Lynde, the school board president who unearthed the denim from a 1980’s bin entitled “college clothes.” Skirts with origin stories of first-year teaching. A pair of trousers from the national guard. Earrings from the 1985 family vacation to Mexico.

I do not discriminate based on the quality of the garment or the quality of who wore it; each holds a worthy lesson. With joints that tremble, I slather myself in these relics, layering jackets, shaking them out for scribbled notes and purer scents, racing to save what I might. I stare at them until I learn that they’re reversible and patched over, weighed down by the folklore left in collars and woe untouched in pockets, and I write—poem after essay after entry—speculating how their owners would’ve liked their coffee. Conclusion: black, except for Grandpa with the Harley, who I’ve observed always prefers pinot noir.

I envision the faces of those I never met and imagine the minds of those I’ve only known decrepit. Their answers and stories reek of mothballs, cowering in dusted garment bags with rusted zippers and water damage, begging for someone to throw open the wardrobe and demand.

This is the ringing bell of a call that resounds in my guts and reminds me that I am the product of compounding generations that I can only trace back to: jackets. And I cannot get them back. They are gone and dying, in the dirt or quickly falling to it. I am the in-between, the blip that is aware, the tilted root in the cranking family tree that investigates and pleads: what about the trunk? What about before me?