It's raining golden leaves today, and the walk from my patio to the mailbox is a carpet sponsored by the honey locust tree that overhangs the patio where I sit now, thinking about change and the passage of time and memory. It's fall, a time of dramatic change and for me a time of bittersweet memory. The first time I fell in love was in the fall; Mona died in the fall. It's a good thing autumn is so darned beautiful!
My old friend Marilyn came to spend a few days with me at the end of last month. She lives in Ashland, Oregon, but we met in California many years ago. And here's the part about change and memory I want to talk about: We agree that we met in the fall of 1972 when my oldest daughter and her son were in Mrs. Bauer's kindergarten. We were instant friends, very close immediately. But I don't remember her being pregant with - or giving birth to - her third child, Jenni, who was born in 1973. So I was thinking maybe Marilyn and I met when our second oldest kids were in Mrs. Bauer's kindergarten together in 1974. Are you still with me?
So the night of the day Marilyn flew back home, I was thinking about this, and I realized that there is no way to prove what year it was that we met: all we have is memory, and memory is so squirrely, so amorphous, so slippery and unreliable that I still think Vernal, Utah, is high in the mountains and looks like summer camp. Here's a photo of Main Street in Vernal that I just downloaded from the Internet.
Memory: No, that's not Vernal.
Me: Yes it is.
Memory: But Vernal's on a hill and there are big evergreens everywhere and blue jays.
Me: No it isn't.
Memory: Yes it is.
But back to Marilyn and when we met. Could I have forgotten her pregnancy? I don't think so. That means we didn't meet until our second kids were in kindergarten. No, that's not right. We can't check it out with the kids. They were just kids - what do they know? We have no photos of that day, and there is no record of our meeting. We both kept journals, but I doubt either of us would have written, "Today I met a friend I will love for the rest of my life."
It's all memory. What I did when I got up this morning is memory and opening this blog post a few minutes ago is memory, so what the hell is now? These labyrinthine wanderings fascinate me and boggle my mind, and in the case of when I met Marilyn, well, it doesn't really matter. Our story is that we met in '72. But clearly, just because two people remember it that way doesn't mean it happened that way.
Do you ever watch TV shows like Law & Order when a cop says to a suspect, "What were you doing last Tuesday at 8:15 PM?" and the suspect pops right out with, "I was visiting my friend Jack at his place in the Bronx." Last Tuesday? Are you kidding me? I'm lucky if I remember what I was doing at 8:15 last night. But there we go, taking our faulty memory into court sometimes and hanging other people's lives on that Trickster Memory.
So maybe I met Marilyn in '72 and maybe in '74, but I'm sure she was here for 4 days at the end of September and we had a great time, and with luck we'll both live long enough to have a conversation someday about exactly what year she was out here and how long she stayed and what we did, but the only important part will be that we are still sharing our memories, no matter how faulty.
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