Tag: memory

Almost every photo I have of myself as a child is extremely blurred. My mother couldn’t take a picture without flinching. The camera was a Kodak Instamatic that used tiny little film cartridges so the quality of the image was never going to be stellar. Still, her snapshot technique was bafflingly poor.

In some ways the photos mirror my childhood recollections and now, more frighteningly, hers. The rosy haze of my youth comes to me through several thicknesses of plate glass.   Faces and objects in my mother’s brain are smearing into obscurity. The sense of time and place. The focus adjustment (nonexistant on the Instamatic) is sliding farther and farther towards the point where there is nothing but a haze of light through the viewfinder. Indistinct.

I look at the pictures with a strange sense of unease. Almost horror.

Here’s my mum.  She’s lived with us for a couple of years now.  She has dementia and doesn’t make new memories. This means she lives either completely in the moment, or in a long-ago past which fades continuously. Forgotten information is sometimes replaced with interesting fabrications.  Most days find her sitting in half-lotus position reading the newspaper.  The news doesn’t “stick” of course, so she doesn’t usually get bored.   (At Christmas she “discovered” her stocking three times in the same day and was delighted every time).

Each morning I make her tea and toast. “I’m getting the full treatment!” she says, always. When hugged, she produces a light hum, invariably an A. I sometimes join in unison, at other times I harmonize with C-sharp, making our hug-chord.

Meanwhile, back in March of 1984….

Small boys bask in the cool confines of a wood panelled basement, playing Pitfall on the Gemini gaming system.  What’s that?  It’s time for the CHUM30 countdown!!!!??? Mustn’t be late!

To the strange generation enjoying their tweens during the last shadows of the pre-computer universe there was only one opportunity, (just one a week mind you…) to enjoy a blissful four minutes in which you pretended you were Van Halen with the video on in front of you. David Lee Roth was appointment viewing.  You had to WANT IT, people!  😉

I’m not a morning person. Coffee is important to me.  It’s one of those things I take for granted most of the time. There are few specific cups of coffee I can recall.  A few places stick out – we used to hang out at the GrabbaJabba in my teen years (more for the cute barista than the espresso).

There is one cup of coffee that will never be forgotten.  In a former career I used to demonstrate at various woodworking shows. Monday mornings were tough. After three days of constant talking and packing up our elaborate booth we were pretty wiped out.

Kansas City Airport. 06:00.  Arthur Bryant’s luncheonette. (Bryant’s is a KC barbecue institution. Jimmy Carter ate there once, and they won’t let you forget it.) The coffee came in this ridiculous glass goblet thingy. The apology was half-hearted. Apparently they hadn’t drained the cleaning solution from the machine and the first pot was mostly soap.  

When I was a child, cars had nice big bench-style backseats and little boys were allowed to stretch out on them for the ride home from some special occasion.

A memory:   I must have been three or four.  I recall the sinking sun framed by the car window as it moved through orange to red.  Pressed against the cushioned upholstery my ears were filled with the rushing sound of wheels and pavement and air. 

I became aware.  It seemed to me that I was at once in the car, and a part of it. All was in motion -the wheels, the thrumming sound, the light as it melted from straw to deep blue. The sun itself descended the glass before my eyes -slowly but discernibly.

But in the very center of all this motion there was stillness. Time, distance, light, sound, day and night were moving at once. Beyond my control – and at the same time I could hold them all captive, instant by instant, inside me.