Thursday Thirteen

1. People remember more about me than I remember about me, sometimes. I find this perplexing and occasionally scary.

2. This is especially true of folks who knew me at certain stages of my life - my teen years, my late 20s, and my mid-30s. Sometimes I run into people I knew from those times. I have no idea who they are. They know who I am.

3. Even now, people I should know say hello to me in the grocery store. I am clueless. I am almost grateful for the mask and the reasons now not to stop and make small talk, when I have no idea what it is I should say.

4. I learned long ago to make generic small talk, ask generic questions, try not to let on that I had no idea who I was speaking with. Sometimes it would come to me days later - Oh! that was so and so. Sometimes I never know. I interviewed hundreds of - maybe more than a 1,000 - people. I can't remember them all, but many remember me.

5. Memory is a strange bird. I have read so much - perhaps I stay lost in story, wandering around like Little Red Riding Hood, seeking my grandmother's lap. I know I'll never find it but here I am, lolling time away in the big bad forest.

6. Some things I remember like they happened yesterday. Many things I do not. Much of the minutia of my life I lost when I shredded my journals earlier in the year. I don't miss it, but sometimes I wonder what exactly I tossed away. I didn't reread them. I'd already lived it once.

7. The other morning I woke with the words, "I remember, we were flying along and hit something in the air," in my mind. I googled them, and found the song DOA by Bloodrock. It came out in 1970. I would have been seven years old. I don't recall anything else about the song, but that first line has stuck with me for 51 years. It's a very gory song about an airplane crash.

8. Other memories include dreams. I have had several reoccurring dreams in my life. One is of a bathtub full of blood; another is a scarecrow chasing me through an apple orchard. Nightmares, both. I seldom dream those dreams now but up until a few years ago, they were a constant.

9. I also have remembered things I couldn't have remembered. My mother told me that when I was about three, I started talking about Scotland, a castle, a graveyard, and a beheading. I went into such detail that it seemed I must have been there, and she forbade me from speaking of it again. She said it left her shaking when I described it.

10. My brain seems to latch on to bad incidents more so than good ones. I remember more bad than good, generally speaking, though if I think hard I can wiggle something good out of a memory or time frame. But it is work. The bad memories fly forth like fireworks from a match. The good memories I have to tease out, like a woman with over-sprayed hair must tear through her locks with a comb to make them behave.

12. One of my earliest memories involves a sandbox. Wind blew sand in my eyes, and it burned. I started screaming. My mother was there and I was running around half blind, shouting, "Call Grandma! Call the fire department!" until my mother could grab me up and rinse my eyes out with water. I wonder how she felt now, as I did not call for her, nor did I even want her help. That must have hurt. What was the reason for my reaction?

13. And lastly, in this strange meme about memory and a tripping down a memory lane full of bricks and overgrown trees, I leave with this - the things we remember are not always our truths. Nor are we our memories. They are but a part of us, and it is up to us to deal with them as we may.

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Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here if you want to read other Thursday Thirteens and/or play along. I've been playing for a while and this is my 723rd time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday. Or so sayth the Blogger counter, anyway.