I had business in Benton the other day. I don't get down there very often anymore even though Benton and I go way back.
The first place I ever lived in Arkansas was a rent house in Benton, although I have no recollection of it. My Uncle Bill and Aunt Jean raised two of my four girl cousins in a house Bill pretty much built himself over in the old part of town way back in the day when Democrats were not a wanted species over there. We used to go visit them all the time when I was a kid.
So I decided that as long as I was making a cameo appearance in Saline County anyway that I would go by the old house on Maple Street after my official duties were fulfilled.
I gave the address to Siri. It didn't exist, according to her. I was left to my own devices. Or rather, I was left with no devices. Other than my vague recollection of how to get to Bill and Jean's from the courthouse. But Benton ain't exactly Manhattan, and I had nowhere else to be that morning. I liked my chances of stumbling across it eventually.
Any lawyer can tell you that memory is a tricky thing. People testify to things that are inaccurate or untrue all the time. And they aren't lying. Or most of them aren't. Our memories are often informed by our emotions. We want to remember stuff the way we want to remember it. That's just human nature.
I recalled that they lived not too far from Lewis Stadium. And after some roaming around, the old ballfield appeared on the other side of the windshield. The same one Billy Bob Thornton's camera lovingly recorded for prosperity in the movie Sling Blade. My own association with it is more intimate. My father and Uncle Bill took me to my first high school football game there. Catholic versus Benton. Biggest guys I had ever seen in my life. Years later, an irate son of Saline County knocked me out briefly on that same hallowed ground with Dad and Uncle Bill in the stands, this time watching me.
I was getting warmer. The map on the dashboard confirmed this guess and after a couple more turns, I was on Maple Street for the first time in what? Fourteen years? And there at the bend in the road was Bill and Jean's house. It looked about the same as I remembered. Only smaller. Red brick. Ranch style. Two-car garage.
I saw the front door that took me into the living room where Aunt Jean kept her copy of Leaves of Gold on the coffee table. Jean was a very proper woman. She actually read the damn thing on occasion along with books written by Dale Evans Rogers. And she found them both useful.
Jean up and died in her sleep in that little house around 2004. Bill lingered on for another year despite two strokes and a broken heart. I last saw him asleep in his bed there with a lady from hospice at his side.
And that's all I could remember as I sat in front of that little house where they raised their family and tolerated me.
I took a picture and sent it to my cousins.
"Home," Rebecca texted back. "Gives me that sad and happy feeling at the same time. The flowers are missing. But the owners must have a kid (basketball goal). No time for flowers!"
I was practically raised in that kid's house. And all I can remember now is Aunt Jean's Leaves of Gold and the last time I saw my Uncle Bill. Oh. One more thing. I remember the smell of Noxzema skin cream that Jananne and Rebecca kept slathered on their skins on a semi-permanent basis during those Saline County summers. It was rumored to ease sunburned skin. Or help said skin tan more easily. I don't recall. Maybe Jananne subscribed to one theory of efficacy and Rebecca another. I don't remember that either. It would concern me if I did.
The picture of that old house on Maple Street, the one that my imperfect memories led me back to, made Rebecca think of the flowers that are no longer there just as the two of us, along with her sister and her parents, are no longer there. Which rendered her both happy and sad in equal measure.
We all want to remember stuff the way we want to remember it. Memory is a tricky thing. It occurred to me as I drove back to my home in Little Rock that maybe, just maybe, our memories of "home" are the trickiest ones of them all.
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Arthur Paul Bowen is a writer and lawyer living in Little Rock.
Editorial on 07/20/2019