It was a spring evening. The sun was setting. The sky was a dark azure blue with cadmium red edges.

Three buses were in the high school parking lot, running. Inside was the pandemonium of out of town musicians, practicing for the evening's concert. There was also this girl. We'd been doing the dance of courtship, getting close, spending time together. I was excited and afraid. I had to leave to clear my mind.

Outside, in the still autumnal evening air, I could hear the bus motors rumbling quietly, and smelled the diesel fumes. I looked at the world around me and commanded it to stop. This moment, this one, I would see, and remember every crystal detail, and this photograph would stay in the film of my mind. All futures branched off from this moment.


I blinked. The world had resumed its turning, and I went inside.


"... an insolid billowing of the solid...
The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins,
As things emerged and moved and were dissolved,

Either in distance, change or nothingness
The visible transformations of summer night,

An argentine abstraction approaching form
And suddenly denying itself away.


The flecked river
Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing
Through many places, as if it stood still in one.
...that in the shadowless atmosphere,
The knowledge of things lay round but unperceived." -- Wallace Stevens

 

 

 


I remember the thirty-five sweet goodbyes,
When you put me on the Wolverine
Up to Annandale

 

 

 

 

 


 

I have to admit, I'm nostalgic. It is part of who I am and it is habit that began before I was 10.

This is semi-relevant because this is an explanation on why so much of my written work here is about then as opposed to now. My imagination seems to work better with the texture of my memory as opposed to the possible future. "The memory of it" is the salient point here.  It is not what was. It is how I recall that it was. Those are two very different things all together.

 

Oleanders growing outside her door,
Soon they're gonna be in bloom
Up in Annandale.


Today the subject of memory came directly to my attention with the happy coincidence of reading the node here (above) on the same day that a series of notes on remembrance arrived from an old friend.


Mr.G's own words:
"...As regards the 'past' written as the present (or some variation therein) it seems that while we all do so mostly, your thoughts are more timeless, and thus easy to believe that the smoke still curls from some forgotten cigarette as you walked next door to write something down,
even though that habit has long been gone-- but still it remains, remade perhaps or just remembered. "


I hope that well remembered is what he was alluding to. I hope that is so. I think most of us are not aiming for immortality, but are just  faithfully telling our stories-some true, some false, some a hybrid of the two. Regardless, most of us want our words to be well remembered, even if we are ourselves are not.

 

 

 

 

 


California tumbles into the sea,
That'll be the day I go,
Back to Annandale

italics are lyrics from My Old School -Steely Dan

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