Summertime

I would sit some­where, quiet, always alone and think to myself: This sec­ond. I am never going to for­get, this sec­ond. I would try to put that moment onto some promi­nent, mural in my mem­ory so I could remem­ber it when and how I wanted. I was around ten years old when I did this a lot.

The fact I was doing it tells me I already knew that mem­ory doesn’t work that way. Every­thing stays packed away in lit­tle boxes until nudged by some other thing – aroma, place, the wind, what­ever. Hope­fully any­way, because when a mem­ory is imme­di­ately recall-able with­out con­text, it tends to be intrusive.

Still, for what­ever rea­son I wanted to play that game. I can’t remem­ber any of those moments in par­tic­u­lar even though I remem­ber play­ing this game many times. Now I look for the the lit­tle nudges. I get near things that will be the cat­a­lyst for mem­ory. I try to iden­tify what will be the mem­ory cat­a­lyst for a moment I am mak­ing in to a trea­sure: Rose’s per­fume, lint in our son’s hand, the sun through a bubble.