Voices
by Karlene Kolesnikov

Not all the voices that speak my name come from memory. Many do. They live with me as a kind of constant commentary, not so much on the present as on the past. They are an unruly, intrusive lot. Their lack of discipline intrudes on conversations better left to monitors of daily life more concerned with the pedestrian present than the poetic past.

I do not mean to create the misunderstanding that the stories I embody of my childhood were in any way out of the ordinary. I have led the most ordinary of lives. My family were unremarkable people who pretended to no great virtues or vices. They might have told you that they did what had to be done and they did the best that they knew how to do. Maybe it is the very ordinariness of their lives that recalls them to me as I move through the small gestures of my own life. I hear my mother’s voice as I hush my granddaughter to sleep. Grandma wipes her dishwater-wet hands on her apron as I reach to turn off the burner under the teakettle. I catch the smell of Grandpa in wood smoke and the rough textures of wool work pants and canvas shirts.

The voices that speak my name summon a constantly recreated past into present reality. They visit with me about the small concerns of this day and of days lived out long years past. They are not always considerate of my need to sleep as they find me on the edge of wakefulness and prod recollections of shared memory. “ Write this down.” they tell me. I write them down, knowing that these poor words committed to paper do not adequately flesh out the people they represent and are an inadequate substitute for the lived reality of the vitality of the family I love.

The grandmother who once fussed over maintaining appropriate bedtimes for my childish self now wakes me at two A.M. to talk about the fake can of peanut brittle that really contained “snakes” made of coiled wire and cloth that flew out at unsuspecting children when they opened the jar. My sister and I never seemed to tire of surprising ourselves by pulling off the jar’s lid to release the snakes. Now, Grandma never seems to tire of retelling the story. It is her way reminding me that she loves me.

Sometimes I just give up and visit with whomever shows up, or, as is often the case, with everybody who shows up. They tell me the same stories over and over, stories of small things, little days that passed in an unremarkable way. Their urgency often surprises me. “Write this down! Tell about your grandpa reading his paper every night under the yellow lamplight. Tell about the time he brought home a kitten is his lunch pail. Tell about the smell of his shirts and his rough brown hands. Don’t forget.”

I don’t forget, but I often wonder who will read these stories; who will care. Is there still space for the content of lives that faded years and years ago? Are we too crowded with stories already? Can I create an acknowledgement of the significance of lives that once sheltered mine? Grandma would have no patience with these questions. She would say my name in that slightly impatient way that she sometimes had and remind me of the time we took the train to Yakima with Aunt Susan.

“Write that down.” She’d say.

Karlene Kolesnikov says, “I graduated from high school in 1965 in Tacoma Washington. I returned to school forty years later, to Northwest Indian College at Lummi where, with the kindness and support of the people there, I earned an AA degree. I am currently a student at Fairhaven College where I designed a concentration, In My Grandmother’s House, which incorporates both the necessity to research history and the opportunity to write creative non-fiction.”