Some things just get seered into your memory. When the atmosphere is just right, and things happen just so, everything crystallizes, and– snapshot– a clear, vivid memory is made. Some little nugget, an image, a feeling burns into the space behind your eyes, into the ether that clouds the space where you live between your chest and the top of your head. Something about them– the adrenaline they create, the pain they cause, the joy they embody– causes the mind to hold on extra tight.
I remember turning in front of an oncoming semi truck at what I thought was a four way stop. I remember walking with a certain tall boy in college, and I remember his beige corduroy jacket with the elbow patches. I remember slushing frozen lemonade in Disneyland and that my legs were sticking to the hot summer seats of the Matterhorn. I remember falling asleep on the bathroom floor hoping I was wrong, hoping things would be different when I awoke. I remember my dad’s glowy face when he brought me lunch in Mrs. Brooks’ class in third grade. I remember my mom and my aunt fighting over economy-sized tubes of toothpaste. I remember wrasslin’ with my cousin, Rocky Todd, and that he locked me in a trunk. When I got out, I whipped him with a bamboo switch. I remember praying in the misty morning, holding hands around the flagpole as a senior in high school. I remember being told in the parking lot next to the school that Gammy had passed away . I remember my first bouquet of flowers, with the note ‘I’m glad you got what you wanted.’ I remember my second bouquet of flowers, birthday flowers, that took my breath away. It was the first time I ever believed someone’s breath could really be taken away. I remember the day Jim Rogers saved my car, convincing my parents not to sell it. I remember he kissed the top of my head and hugged me when I cried, a few months before he died. I remember eating pickled eggs and fried chicken on the beach in Newport. I remember meeting Jonny Lang. I remember the first time I saw Crystal ever really cry, the day she came to say goodbye. I remember dancing with Sanjeev and Jennifer at the Mock Trial dance. I remember when the tall boy with the elbow patches moved his chair into the aisle, next to mine, when the class overflowed with high school visitors. I remember seeing my new neighbors before they moved in, one very pregnant and the other very tall. I remember the first time I saw Emme.
Occasionally, the mind is wrong, and the thing isn’t important. Or it could have been life-changing but wasn’t. Or it was, for a time, monumental but then slowly changed; it could, for a time, have been the future but then slowly turned. Still some other things really do deserve to be emblazened across all time and space in our brains, images that forever zing and shuttle up through our vision at the slightest provocation. They’re the highs and the lows that punctuate the softer in-between times. They’re the specific edges of life.
This was poignant puddie. Poignant.