Remembering

Sometimes I wish I could remember some of the things I don't remember, if that makes any sense. Much in the same way certain images are imprinted forever in my brain because they are in photo albums or hanging on a wall in my parents' house, certain memories occur to me regularly because I keep remembering them, and then--like tires settling in the old tread marks--they just keep finding their way back into place.

This is frustrating because many of these memories do not feel particularly significant to me and because I fear they are filling space that could otherwise be occupied by new and more helpful or revelatory ones. For example, I can recreate an entire scene that took place at my first grade best friend's house during the early stages of a sleepover when two teams engaged in a "You Light Up My Life" sing-off. The day after the party, when we were waiting for my father to pick me up, my friend's father said, "Little pitchers have big ears," in reference to something we girls had overheard, and I remember thinking it through without asking to have it explained and figuring it out and being pleased that I understood the expression.

Wait! I was about to recount some other uninteresting memories to prove my point about the capriciousness of memory, but for some reason the "little pitchers" memory triggered a chain reaction of memories having to do with this old best friend. Suddenly I remember that she had one of those little gadgets you could use to print out strips of sticker plastic with raised letter words punched in, and that I read most of Judy Blume's Forever in her parents' bedroom closet, and that she was one of the first people to have an Atari and that I learned how to play Donkey Kong (terribly) in her carpeted basement rec room, and that almost everyone used to have rec rooms (what are they now? wine cellars? or more recently, homeless shelters?), and that at the school we went to for kindergarten we could walk up the street to the house she lived in before the sleepover house by ourselves after school and that her mother made grilled cheese sandwiches with American cheese, which is still one of my top three kinds of sandwich maybe because I used to eat them at her kitchen table.

And even more--I can't stop, am remembering the details too fast to write them. She had bunk beds, and I once wet the bed at her house in kindergarten, which is young for sleepovers, no?, and tried to cover up the evidence, and at the second house she lived in when we were kids she had a swimming pool and she once had a pool party and I befriended a girl I had always thought was stuck-up but it turned out, I remember explaining to my mother from the backseat of the car on the way home, that actually she had thought I was stuck-up, which was why we had never before spoken, and that we were maybe destined to be great friends (I never saw her again; she moved that summer).

And finally, I remember the dress I wore to this friend's bat mitzvah. It was black and kind of silky-feeling with tiny colored flowers and a white cotton lace collar and a thin sash that tied in the back and was not Laura Ashley like most of my dresses at that age but was another popular brand that started with a "P" (I think) and was also more sophisticated than most of my other dresses because I had bought it with my aunt and not my mother. We had bought it for me to wear to my grandfather's funeral, and my aunt had taken me because I had nothing quite right, and my mother was otherwise occupied with funeral details, and I remember standing in the store with my aunt, who I felt to be much more like-minded when it came to fashion than my mother, and holding up this dress on its hanger with a question in my eyes, and feeling guilty by how pleased I was to be getting it when I had been so devastated by my grandfather's death that I had secretly pledged never to be happy again.

It strikes me that after all, that turned out to be a string of insignificant memories, all but the last bit, because I had sort of forgotten that feeling after my grandfather died of forgetting that I could not be happy every once in a while at first, when something nice happened, and then--gradually--realizing that nice things would keep happening and that it was okay to be happy and that it didn't mean I loved my grandfather any less than I knew that I did. And this, I think, was a very good thing to have learned at thirteen.