Memory Lane
Dec. 22nd, 2007 02:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoopbeckI've been posting a lot. That's kind of strange. I haven't really felt like posting for about a year now except for the occasional squee about a television show, or a meme, or something that I overheard.
I was just thinking about how strange memory is. In the slow drive towards Christmas, in the few days before the actual holiday, I inevitably find myself thinking about the same thing each year.
It's a memory.
When I was in third grade, Julie was my best friend. I was in choir, she was in drama, we were both in the Lusher Elementary Christmas Extravaganza. I sang and threw snowballs; she was a tiger from a sequence involving Santa's toyshop.
From that point onward, we spent every waking moment possible in each other's company. We'd do recitals of Shakespeare off of my front porch and hers (yes, I'm that much of a freak--in third grade, my favorite books were Macbeth and the Lord of the Rings trilogy). There were interminable games to be played in my backyard or hers. By the next year, she'd quit drama and had joined me in choir. Our choir was pretty good, and we took our caroling (and our new Christmas Extravaganza) across the city, singing and dancing in a variety of places.
The memory is this: Julie and I are talking after a concert. We are still wearing our costumes (bowties, sparkly shoes, makeup so our faces can be seen in the powerful stage lights, sweaters with the name of our musical emblazoned across them in glittery gold), and we sneak a few cookies from the overladen table near the door.
This is before her parents' divorce. Her mother is there to drive us to someplace else; I'm not sure where my mother was, or why she wasn't at the concert. We get into Julie's mother's car, still chattering, clutching cookies in one hand, red Dixie cups of punch in the other. We buckle up, and I can see Julie's mother in the rearview mirror, checking on us and the road behind her before she moves out into traffic.
That's all I remember.
It's not an especially important or significant memory. In fact, its only significance is that there is no conclusion, no neatly-tied bow to end it. For various reasons I remember my memories in story format; they go beginning-middle-end, and the few fragments that have become splintered away from the parent memory have been absorbed into other memories, or have been slightly edited in the way that all memories from childhood have been, reformatted so that they make sense from the perspective of older-me.
But the fact that I don't know what happens next in this memory eats at me. Did we go to Julie's house? Did her mother drive me home? Was there another concert? A car wreck? What? It has been thirteen years since that night. Why does this memory surface every December? And why do I feel like something has been lost?
I was just thinking about how strange memory is. In the slow drive towards Christmas, in the few days before the actual holiday, I inevitably find myself thinking about the same thing each year.
It's a memory.
When I was in third grade, Julie was my best friend. I was in choir, she was in drama, we were both in the Lusher Elementary Christmas Extravaganza. I sang and threw snowballs; she was a tiger from a sequence involving Santa's toyshop.
From that point onward, we spent every waking moment possible in each other's company. We'd do recitals of Shakespeare off of my front porch and hers (yes, I'm that much of a freak--in third grade, my favorite books were Macbeth and the Lord of the Rings trilogy). There were interminable games to be played in my backyard or hers. By the next year, she'd quit drama and had joined me in choir. Our choir was pretty good, and we took our caroling (and our new Christmas Extravaganza) across the city, singing and dancing in a variety of places.
The memory is this: Julie and I are talking after a concert. We are still wearing our costumes (bowties, sparkly shoes, makeup so our faces can be seen in the powerful stage lights, sweaters with the name of our musical emblazoned across them in glittery gold), and we sneak a few cookies from the overladen table near the door.
This is before her parents' divorce. Her mother is there to drive us to someplace else; I'm not sure where my mother was, or why she wasn't at the concert. We get into Julie's mother's car, still chattering, clutching cookies in one hand, red Dixie cups of punch in the other. We buckle up, and I can see Julie's mother in the rearview mirror, checking on us and the road behind her before she moves out into traffic.
That's all I remember.
It's not an especially important or significant memory. In fact, its only significance is that there is no conclusion, no neatly-tied bow to end it. For various reasons I remember my memories in story format; they go beginning-middle-end, and the few fragments that have become splintered away from the parent memory have been absorbed into other memories, or have been slightly edited in the way that all memories from childhood have been, reformatted so that they make sense from the perspective of older-me.
But the fact that I don't know what happens next in this memory eats at me. Did we go to Julie's house? Did her mother drive me home? Was there another concert? A car wreck? What? It has been thirteen years since that night. Why does this memory surface every December? And why do I feel like something has been lost?
no subject
Date: 2007-12-24 04:14 am (UTC)It's totally ridiculous that you live just down the street from me and it took over a week for that card to get to my house. Yay Millbrook!