Motes

Shinning bits, tiny and fragmented. Like dust motes floating in late afternoon sun. Bits suspended, supported by nothing but that invisible mass known as air. Some bits are moving and some seem still, just stuck in space.

This array of bits is memory, well more specifically my memory. How my mind stores its past isn't rational or hierarchical. My memory is a thousand planets spewing out across a universe the center of which is me.

Every passing moment either gravity or another force of nature moves a piece of my memory. Some flickers of the past are heading toward the black holes of my personal universe. Some are drawn into the fire of my conscious focused mind for a brief few moments. But like matter twisted by gravity and the other immutable rules of physics so are these little motes are always being modified simply by being part of the stream of my existence.

Maybe it is gravity in every sense of the word that keeps in my mind zipping back to age two. Gasping I am stuck inside a heavy quilted plastic garment bag on a late summer afternoon. My body is sweating profusely and I remember stale plastic smelling air. Somehow I have managed to zipper it closed from the inside. Most likely my breath was getting low but somehow my brother comes upon me and pulls me out before it is too late. And then there was the "scary" lecture from Mom and Dad about death and suffocation and the appropriate places where good little boys should play. Thank God there was no internet or someone, one of my brothers most likely, would have pulled off pictures of purple swollen dead people who had suffocated and shown them to me as an object lesson. If that had happened then I would never have stored my clothes again, ever.

But what are these memories that pop up? In writing a story recently about an incident at the swimming pool of my childhood I remembered perhaps a more telling story of that place and of my relationship with my middle brother. I was maybe in kindergarten. Maybe it happened when I was in first grade, I dunno which but I was young and I listened to my brother back then. My older brother suggested that when Joe the lifeguard was leaning over the pool I rush up behind the big man and give a push. I did, reaction followed action and Joe went ass over head into the water. Me, well I was thrown out of the pool for the day. A large number of people laughed. My brother got thrown out for the day too and my Mom was really pissed. Cue up the disgraced our family lecture. One soaking wet man in his wayfarers yelling at me hangs there in my memory. I laugh a little bit and squirm a little bit when this pops into my rearview mirror. Those two minutes captured in a loop that repeats on certain days, say when I watch my kids at the community pool, says tons about my brother and his toxic influence (at times) on with me. It says quite a bit about my gullibility. But what could I expect of myself, I was six or seven tops and my brother was 14 or 15. He should have known better. Was it the complete impact on my senses of the consequences that followed this action that made it memorable I don't know?

Or the moment when I was sixteen and cruising through the Soo boat locks with my Dad one chilly August afternoon. Wearing windbreakers we about froze to death sitting on the boat’s deck, but I remember the flag on the bow of the boat. The pennant was whipping, whipping in the breeze. Watching that flag I was thinking this would be the only time I was ever going to be here and God what a forsaken place this is The flag which was read and white and I think was the logo of the boat line but it mesmerized me. Life has deposited me much closer to the Soo that I ever thought would happen, but I didn't know that would happen then. Even before I came here I knew the memory of that that pennant whipping wildly above that cold water would pop up again and again in my life.

Or, what is it that takes me back to the lady drowning her child with the ice cream cone? Really why does that bit come back again and again? I mean it was her own fault especially since I had told her not to hold the mountainous twin peaked cone of chocolaty goodness over his face. This happened when I was working at the soft serve place on the boardwalk. It was hot and humid and I told her not to buy the big cone because I knew she would have a mess on her hands. I mean this literally because it was inevitable that the pile of swirled goo would fall off the cone. I mean it was nearing 100% humidity and those soft serve machines don’t really chill stuff when there is such a level of moisture in the air. But the little squalling brat wanted the big one and then didn't want it and it was because of the dynamic of that dispute that she held the wad of dissolving delight over his face and it fell off the contents of the cone filling his eyes, nose and mouth causing him to almost drown on the boardwalk more that 300 yards from the ocean on a dry if very humid night.

Or finally why is it I go back to the time the guy in the infield of the Kentucky Derby was so drunk that he almost drowned on dry land in 90 degree heat? I mean he was so high he fell back against his Styrofoam cooler and it broke forming a collar that fit pretty tight around his neck. This dude was so drunk the cold water didn't wake him up and his head slowly began to tip downward. The man’s skull was at the point where his open mouth and flaring nostrils were about to go under when we pulled him out and let his friends know his was too fucked up for his own good. Maybe alcohol poisoning got him. But that isn’t the memory I hold on to. What I see again and again is the slow motion slide, the tilt into the 1 foot by 2 foot Styrofoam sea.

Maybe as I catch these specks in the light and tie them up and bind them to paper I can let them go. It may be a Buddhist kind of thing the equivalent of putting my wishes or regrets down on paper and then vanishing them. Perhaps I do this by setting this metaphorical paper afire, or by walking away from them after tying them to a tree one to which I will not return. Either way I have unburdened myself.

Any given set of words will never capture a memory; they are just an outline of some limited sense of the objective in a specific recollection. My memories aren't special; they just are my little fragments of a past I can’t go back to.

The reason I write is because the desire to do so is something that has always been inside of me. Deep down there is an urge to create a diagram of these dust motes that make up my life. With words I try and craft a kind of star map of the attic that is my mind. One word and then another must fall onto the electronic paper. One past moment captured and a new space for experience opened up. I doubt I will do enough in these remaining years to make anywhere near enough memories to fill the space I am emptying, but I gotta clear some room out just in case I do.

Motes in golden sunlight twinkling spin on for now, but not forever.