Footprints on the Ceiling

Footprints on the Ceiling

My family’s footprints can be traced all around the country. From San Diego, California to Jacksonville, Florida with a plethora of stops in between, my life has always been a consistent pattern of move, settle down, get orders, pack up and repeat. It had never been a question. As hard as it was, moving was just part of military life.

The main part of my childhood was split between three places - Norfolk, Virginia, San Diego, California, and Memphis, Tennessee, but my earliest memories are from San Diego. While we lived in the other places for only two to three years, we remained in sunny California for six.

Our cozy little house on Rose Place had three small bedrooms, a neat living room with soft, brown leather couches, and a big picture window. My favorite place in our house was the playroom, two short steps down from the kitchen.

The walls were lined with dark wood panelling, aside from a large stone fireplace in the back wall, and an unframed mirror above it. Dominating the room was a tall, black, metal structure, nearly scraping the ceiling. A stack of rusty weight plates on each side held the two legs down, preventing the contraption from tipping over. Suspended from a metal chain, an old canvas punching bag swung gently back and forth. The “spine” of the tool was a thick, black pole, littered with orange and white “warning” stickers. About three quarters of the way up, it split into two smaller bars slightly curved backward, with another horizontal pull-up bar holding them together.

Every afternoon after school, my brothers and I would race in the door and head straight to the playroom. My older brother would settle at his desk to begin his homework. I would carefully perch myself on the bottom step with a toy or coloring materials. My little brother, Yoni, on the other hand would haphazardly drop his knapsack on the floor, and dash to the pull-up bar. Too short to reach the bar, he shimmied his way up the pole until he was high enough.

Once he grasped the bar with both hands, he walked his bare feet up the rest of the bar in a very monkey-like fashion. As Yoni’s feet reached the highest point on the bar, he continued walking, landing them on the ceiling. Moving his feet around on the ceiling, we all laughed. After a moment, he flipped over, hung for a second longer and dropped to the floor.

One day, sitting at my usual spot on the playroom steps, I looked up, my gaze landing on the mirror over the fireplace. I spotted a handful of dark smudges over the reflection of the playroom ceiling. I blinked a few times to make sure it wasn’t my eyes, and then looked up at the ceiling right over the pull-up bar. There were several, small, black marks on the ceiling.

“What is that?” I wondered aloud.

My mother hurried over.

“What is what?” She asked.

“That,” I said, pointing to the spots on the ceiling.

My older brother was the one to figure it out.

“When Yoni does his ‘climb and flip routine’ - he probably leaves footprints on the ceiling!”

As a Navy family, my mother and I joke that sometimes we have to stop and think,

What city do I live in right now? What does our house look like?

In the many times I have had to go back and think about each house, I stop to recall the footprints on the ceiling in our San Diego home. Those footprints represent the six years we spent in California, building, growing and connecting. Although those footprints have likely been wiped off long ago, in our memory they remain.

Despite the fact that we are no longer physically there, our footprints still live on. The footprints of my father and brothers walking to and from Shul each morning. The footprints of the nightly walks I would take with my mother, to decompress from the stress of everyday life - especially when moving time would approach. The footprints that carried us around our many houses. Those footprints still remain. And through those footprints, our memories live on.