forgetting | Metamorphosism

I had planned to go bouldering with my daughter so I ate a lighter-than-usual breakfast so I would be lighter than usual while climbing, so by the time I got into town I was hungry and went into a bakery and as I stood there waiting my turn and deciding whether to get a slice of pizza or a sausage baked into what looks like a croissant* I felt for my wallet and it was missing.
I started patting all my pockets and realized i was blocking traffic so I went outside and did a more thorough search of myself – suit jacket, pants, and winter coat and although the spare notebook, crow snacks, various receipts and two random small candles were present and accounted for, because they live in my coat, everything else was missing – wallet, card holder, pens, various ID cards, spare elastic hair thing, cleaning rag for spectacles (the small one), emergency USB stick, spare lighter (in case I need to light a candle or, should the apocalypse or final uprising occur while I am out and about, a camp fire or a barricade).
Pickpocket OMG! I thought, before dismissing that theory on the basis of no pickpocket is that thorough.
What that leaves is I am a moron as usual.
That reminds me my wife is doing genealogical research and noticed a question on one old census, “Are there any idiots or lunatics in your household?”.
She did not tell me how my ancestors answered that but I know how I would.
But interesting, how those words used to be, like, scientific expressions.
I knew at once why I forgot everything (barring OCD pickpockets) – I had short-circuited my morning routine. After breakfast I was upset because my wife said, “you realize you are not telling me this for the first time” as I explained that black rye is not a different sort of rye but simply a more roughly-milled rye flour (something I explain every time I bake rye bread and someone compliments it and I say, oh, you think so? well I used some black rye flour) and I went upstairs to get dressed and my mind was busy thinking about how dumping information is a love language and time to put my pajamas into the clothes hamper and I did that and got dressed and put my phone into my pocket and went downstairs because my brain read “pajamas in hamper and phone in pocket” as “putting things away/into pockets” with the result that it did not feel weird to go directly downstairs instead of – as usual – standing by my nightstand and putting everything into my pockets (wallet, cards, hair thing, lighter, USB stick, pens, glasses cloth, IDs, etc).
Putting on shoes, I even had a hunch – some distant clump of synapses trying to warn me – that I might be forgetting something so I checked if I had crow feed (yes) and a face mask (no! good thing I checked!).
Anyway. Morning routine. Very important.
__________
*by this i of course mean “whether to purchase a slice of pizza, or a sausage baked into a croissant,” and not “whether to have the baker bake into a croissant one of two things – a slice of pizza or a sausage.”

My little brother sent me some short videos this week.
It went like this: he transferred VHS tapes to a DVD. Then he played the videos from the DVD on his computer, and filmed the monitor with his iPhone. Then he sent me the iPhone videos via a social media site, and I forwarded them to my family.
The quality of the videos was of course poor; not only were the original tapes nearly 30 years old, each step transferring, copying and refilming degraded them further.
And yet: they were still superior to my own memories of the events — a visit we paid to my family in the United States when our oldest daughter was one year old.
Alpha and I are now older than my parents are in the videos.
The house in which we sing Happy Birthday has since burned in an arson fire, and then been torn down to make way for a mall parking lot.
Some details were only slightly surprising: Beta is a serious baby in the video. I remember that she was a serious baby, but she was even more serious than I recall.
Some details contradicted our memories entirely: for 30 years, we have told Beta she never crawled, just went straight from rolling to walking. But in the video she crawls just fine. She was a fast crawler, chasing my parents’ wiener dog all over the living room.
To be honest, the videos freaked me out a little.
The speed at which time passes, for one thing. How people just die, two people from the video, for example, but time just keeps going.
But we know that. What really freaked me out was how the evidence contradicted our memories. I know I forget things. We all forget things. I know I have forgotten most of my life, when it comes down to it. But to see blurry, grainy but genuine evidence that even the little bit I remember is false, that’s freaky.
It’s one thing to read somewhere that memory is nothing but stories we tell ourselves, and that any particular memory is altered to a greater or lesser extent with each re-telling, but to actually see the proof like that makes you wonder what else you’re wrong about.
What grudges you’d be better off dropping.
What pain you could let go.

Metamorphosism

Tag Archives: forgetting

Morning routine

On memory and reality