Every night on this journey, I've done two things: checked my email and taken my memory card into the motel or B&B to see again what I already saw. PIctures don't capture everything--some things I'd have to stop in the middle of a road to snap, after all--but they are sketches of the day.
It got me wondering, on my 65th birthday, if that's how it is when, at the end of life, our "whole lives flash in front of our faces." All the people and experiences that have brought us joy or contributed to our life lessons may flash back like the pictures on the memory card exporting onto the computer to re-live.
The blackened cod I had in Eureka was delicious--but I keep smelling it everywhere I go, less appealing that on my first meeting with it. And so last night I washed all my clothes in the Best Western bathtub, thinking maybe I'd spilled a few dribbles on what I was wearing that night as I hauled my take home box back to the motel.
This morning, after all that washing and rolling, I could still smell it and discovered that indeed I had spilled some cod juice but on the green pancho that I hadn't washed!
It reminded me of my son, Will, back in sixth grade. "Somebody in all my classes stunk today," he reported when I picked him up. You could see the light coming on in his eyes after he'd scanned his memory to determine what other sixth grader was in all his classes. He opened his back pack to discover that a bottle of something he'd taken to freshen up after gym had broken and that the contents of the bottle had gotten all over his clothes. The smell--he was slowly realizing--was coming from Will's own back pack. How often do we blame other people for what we're carrying in our own back packs, I wonder?
Every memory takes us back to other memories. Maybe they are all stored on the memory cards in our psyches to give us something to laugh about at the end of the day.
My memory card is full--but not yet full enough. I'm getting wonderful notes from friends who know this drive to Portland better than I do, and I'm setting out after a long soaky bath to add some more data to the card, literally and metaphorically!
I asked Day how she knew that I already had a cart-full of books I'd like to order at Amazon (when she sent me a gift card for Amazon.) "I've known you for my entire life," she wrote back. "That's how I knew."
Very few people have known us for our entire lives--or we theirs. Whatever we've done or said, whatever we've neglected to do that we wish we had--it's all imprinted on their memory cards-- and vice versa. If we sat down to compare notes, however, we'd soon realize that the way we framed it might not match the way they framed it on theirs.
I woke up to emails from Betty--with whom I've been friends for 60 years--and Carlene, who's the only one who's known me for all 65 of these years, through all the ups and downs and ins and outs that have made up my life so far, and from friends who have, to my great good fortune, become parts of my present and my future. I am saving all these wonderful notes that are starting my new year on a great big up! When I get home, I'll print them all out and save them, along with postcards and snapshots, as reminders that wherever we go, we're never truly going solo.
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