Circulation

The earliest memory I have of my childhood is sitting on the floor of the living room, watching Mickey Mouse while my mother was in the kitchen cooking dinner and reading her medical book simultaneously. She didn’t start medical school until I was two, and my father had just received the job of working for weeks at a time on the railroad. With my mom working and going to school, and my dad working on the railroad, the only person to watch me during the day was my grandmother, Rebecca Sue, who taught me to read and write. I would go to her home around five o’clock in the morning everyday, go back to sleep, wake up and eat breakfast, read my grandmothers medical books, and go home at eight o’clock at night; my daily routine until school began at the age of five. While most children were playing on the monkey bars and reading picture books, I was reading how blood circulated throughout the body and each molecule was unique in itself. From a young age, we are taught that we are each unique, but we never guess why. I, having grown up around medical text, knew exactly why; we can never become the same person that we envy, and we are never the same person we are when we are young or even the day before, but we can push ourselves to be the person we admire most. In my mind, this is my grandmother and mother.

The uniqueness that we feel when we are younger can get lost in the progression of our lives. The constant circulation of going from place to place can make us lose the specialness we understand as early as childhood. The textbooks I use everyday are a large part in the circulation of my daily life. I wake up, walk to school, do my work, go home, study out of text books for a few hours, and go to bed. Repeat. If we constantly do the same thing each day, how does that make us unique? The routine I became accustomed to, shadows the individual characteristics, but I still know that I do have something to prove I am different. I have the backpack of a committed honors student that carries around textbooks so I can progress later in life and eventually become a surgeon. I have the willpower to keep moving forward and keep circulating through my schedule everyday, in order to reach my goals. My life has always been on a consistent plan that I can rely on daily to know where I will end up at the end of the day, but one thing I can never know, is where my life will be in twenty years; for that, we have to play the waiting game and allow things to circulate through and edge new pathways in my mind.

There is a single box that has been a part of my family for four generations. This single box has traveled around the world eighteen times. It contains unique symbols of my ancestors, ranging from draft cards to a single pen that my great-great grandfather used to write to the love of his life with from across the world. It has circulated from child to child. Each person that has gotten possession of the box has had a crash course on how to open the small hidden compartments that contain old, fragile images. I can open the box and lift the tray that seems to stay in one spot, unable to move, and find pieces of stale paper with calligraphy writing on it with the birth date, name, height, and weight of each child until official birth certificates were established. In May of 2016, I was able to add a baby image of the woman who initiated the circulation of wanting to learn more. My grandmother left the Mother of Pearl, Cherrywood box to me. I plan on passing it on to my children when my time comes, and hopefully, I will have an image of myself as a laughing infant, studying student, and old frail woman placed in the hidden compartment of the box.