This writing prompt, “Write Scenes With Your Senses” popped into my email today and it made me think. To quote the email, “When a memory suddenly pops into our head it is often just a fragment: a smile, a gentle touch, the tone of a voice. What anchors those fragments and transforms them into a scene that lives on the page is the body. Our senses are the portal. Writing through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch grounds a scene in the moment and makes it come alive. Sensory details allow the reader to know not just what happened, but to experience it with their own body. It is said that specificity is the soul of narrative.” I have these sorts of memories, mainly, from early childhood.

The discussion continued with also many “have had the experience of hearing a song from our teen years and having flashes of memory from our high school dance from decades before. Suddenly we see the disco ball shooting shards of light across our friends faces, we smell the perfume or cologne of our dance partner, we feel our feet shuffle on the floor to the rhythm of the music, we taste the flavor of our favorite gum.” Sadly I have not and I have no memory of taste of any thing but Kleespie’s Bakery rye bread. (Also a childhood memory.) This last is what propelled me into baking bread as a hobby in the 1980s.

Reading the first paragraph my brain responded with an early, very early, memory of Cub Scouts and knothole baseball. I did not play knothole baseball as a kid but I was a Cub Scout. I imagine this game was a cub scout activity. My Dad was not a huge sports fan or any kind of sports fan, although he did like bowling when I was small.

The memory that came to me like a video vision is an image that has me on a ball field near Oakley Park near where I lived then. The video is silent in my head. It was late in the afternoon and the pitcher was a 7 or 8 year old like I was. Standing there at the plate he threw 4 loopy-doop pitches in a row and I walked to first base. Three other batters behind me also walked to their bases and I walked home. Not knowing much about baseball, I thought so that is what a home run is. It was a home walk in this case.

I was excited about scoring but no one was there to see it. There are no cheers in the audience. I cannot see an audience. I only see the ball diamond. I do not see any coaches but there must have been some. The scene is starkly quiet.

Later when Dad picked me up I told him about my “home run” and scoring a run. He did not correct my misconception. He merely replied, “I wish I was there to see that.” I could hear his voice as he said that. As we rode home in the car he asked me about other things and he may have taken me to get ice cream but the memory fades and that image is not there. I can hear his voice, “I wish I was there to see that” with a little disappointment in his voice. Dad dearly loved ice cream so that image is obfuscated with other trips to various ice cream parlors near our house.

Today my scenes with my senses are focused on Dad and childhood. The only audio is – I wish I was there to see that.

Dad was in the Navy before I was born. I wish he was still here. Do we ever quit being children?

Carpe Diem.