Writing and Remembering

Memories, memoirs, Memorial Day. Sometimes Life seems to conspire to bring something to our attention. Here it is, Memorial Day again. I can scarcely grasp that it has been two years since my mother slipped away ... and how long since all my other relatives left. I remember Mama always dragging me to the cemeteries to put flowers on our closest relatives' graves. The annual parade ended at the graveyard, too. In her later years, my mother wouldn't watch parades because they made her cry too easily.

Now I know why.

To distract myself from such weepy thoughts, I started to set up my new combo speakerphone/answering machine. Made in China. The User's Guide read pretty well, until I reached the section about storing numbers. Instead of referring to them as "entries", the booklet called stored numbers "memories". "To erase existing memories, ..." it instructed. If only. Sometimes the best we can do is to use our energy to force the focus on the happy ones:

• a tricycle decorated with crepe paper
• the sweet fragrance of iris flowers
• Mama's yummy fried chicken
• holding hands while walking
• Mama reading to me, tucked under her arm
  

I'd write a memoir about the era of my childhood, but Annie Dillard's An American Childhood already covers both the time and the territory so well.