:: anne in the attic ::

Create Your Own Countdown

:: Friday, May 28, 2004 ::

Some post-"Pilgrimage to California" road trip musings:

Thirty-year-old memories, like the bubbles in blown glass, are distorted, permanent, deeply embedded, hand-hewn. The human element had its effect long ago, and now time slowly erodes them until the dust can be simply blown away.

I think of the short story by Jorge Luis Borges, "Funes the Memorious," in which the main character suffers a perfect memory for every detail of his existence, his experience. At one point, he expresses a difficulty in having the same name for "a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile)" as for "[the same dog] at three-fifteen (seen from the front)." On some level, I would have to agree on the propriety of incorporating both time and perspective into our nomenclature, specific as we already believe it to be.

How else could I explain that the house at Robert Court, seen from all sides in 1969 at the four-year-old height and comprehension, is not the same as the house seen from the front in 2004 at the thirty-eight-year-old height and comprehension? Yet it is the same house. In the same place. And parts of the old memories fall together easily, some of them normal, heartening, others eerie and somewhat alien.

Perhaps now, as an adult, I wonder what my life really was like back then. I'd like to go back and take a closer look-- not to affect or to change circumstances, but just to observe them, to know them better. What am I forgetting? Have I lost something integral? I want to know. It's kind of why I went back. Guess I didn't quite know that when I left here.

Not knowing the alternatives, I think that I am grateful things went the way they did: it's the only way I could end up here... now. Perhaps that's a bit fatalistic, but with the twist of choice, of the possibilities of many paths which always lay before us in the potential. In a way, Kirk's life ended early so that mine became as it is today. I would thank him for the choice to have a child enter his life, if only briefly, and for sowing the seeds for my life in just the way that he must have. And, when I finally made it back thirty-five years later, for showing up on cue.

:: Anne 9:35 PM [smartass remarks] ::
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