This towering eucalyptus was already old when I was in elementary school at Madison Meadows in Phoenix, and it was wide enough to block the path from home to away-from-home.  The Big Tree’s leaves laced the sky; sun burnt bark peeled and fell away from its body; its roots gripped the ground where it had stood for a century.   Back then, the tree gave shade and cover for fights that began in the schoolyard and smoldered until dismissal.  We all understood what “Meet me at the Big Tree” meant:  the words were a challenge, a waving red flag signaling a crowd of bike-straddling students to gather and witness and fan the flames.

Beneath the Big Tree, I saw boys—sometimes best friends—wrestle murderously in the dirt; there, I saw a girl lose her tube top slugging the boy who’d broken her heart; there, two chronic insomniacs—my best friend Laurie and I—met sometimes at midnight to roam our neighborhood, studying the skeletons of night-lit houses to see how other families lived.  And there, two years ago, I met my father to strategize in secret, after my mother—confused and angry and terrified as her aging brain dissolved to lace—bruised his body and broke his thumb.

Certain artifacts from our pasts are discarded; others stay with us, charged with emotional power.  The Big Tree often appears in my stories.  I’ve imagined my teenage characters standing beneath its familiar umbrella, where the air tastes—in my memory—of coconut and citrus, sweat and cooling mud.  Their hearts beat loudly from danger they’ve summoned, as they swagger and posture, daring a friend or protector or life itself to strike the first blow.  But the stories we tell affect us, too; they become part of our personal mythology.   When I met my father at the Big Tree—the site chosen unconsciously, unintentionally—I implored him to see what my brothers and I knew:  caretaking was killing him, and he had to save himself.

That night I pocketed a large piece of the Big Tree’s bark—curved gracefully, like a hand at rest or half a prayer—and carried it home with me to Philadelphia.  This tree bark now sits on my writing desk, while I sort through the sad story of my father’s rescue and my mother’s decline.  Sometimes I stop and rest my hand on the wood and, in the mysterious way that memory frees and fails us, I’m a teenager again.  I am returned like magic to some forgotten sense of safety, as I kneel beneath the Big Tree and touch its rough trunk, feel its gnarled roots beneath my sneakers.

8th Grade Graduates, Madison Meadows Class of 1977

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