“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance,” said Shakespeare’s Ophelia.
I do love rosemary. The scent. And the taste in food.
Speaking of memory, I am fascinated by this quote:
“He who remembers his childhood better
Than others is the winner,
If there are any winners at all.”
from “1924” by Yehuda Amichai
What do you think he means by that?
I wonder if it has to do with learning from our pasts?
Do you think about memory very often?
I think that I do, but sometimes it is because I feel a sense of responsibility for what I haven’t even asked for. For instance, big batches of old family photos keep turning up in my care. I have been scanning the lot of photos from my mother’s house when she moved from the garden home to the “big house” which is the apartment building in her retirement community (now she lives in a different building, in assisted living). Nobody else was going to do this, so I felt responsible for the photos. My grandfather and my father had put a lot of time into taking pictures.
Then yesterday a big box shows up on my porch. My brother sent me all the photo albums that were left over.
Eventually I have to organize all my scans and post them where family members can get them. Or some such.
In the meantime, I do feel some stress over it.
But then I find photos that bring me back to a moment in time. I went on a trip to California with my parents and brother between 7th and 8th grade. My father had quit smoking, and the money he saved went toward the trip. Our goal was to head down to LA to visit my cousins, but we landed in San Francisco for a few days. We found the intersection of Haight and Ashbury where I searched for hippies who were left over from the previous summer’s Summer of Love.
We ran into a filming of the TV show Ironside. I loved that show. Raymond Burr who played Perry Mason for years on TV now played a police chief who was in a wheelchair. One of the stars was Don Galloway. The scene being filmed on the street had Galloway outside and Burr’s stunt double inside a white van. My dad, never shy to ask, got Galloway to pose for a picture with my brother and me. I also got his autograph, but I don’t have that any longer. Can you dig my groovy yellow wrap-style sunglasses?
Of course, when I went back to school after our trip, I was so much more sophisticated than the previous year. Or so I thought!
Here’s another pic. In this one my brother and I (perhaps age 14) are playing Monopoly with my father at our house we lived at until I was done with junior high. I mentioned the game in Scrap, but game playing had an even bigger part in my childhood than I wrote about in the book. Monopoly was only one of several games, but it was the one most fitting for my father who began, when I was a teen, to collect buildings in real life in much the same way he did when playing the game. Because he didn’t have a lot of money to spend, they were usually older, run-down, in need of some TLC.
So I don’t need rosemary to remember. Just the drudgery of scanning old photos.
Or really anything. Everything reminds me of something before.
