Half a Century of Thoughts -- part one

The shadows cast by the great trees are long. The trees seem to lean over me as the branches reach down waving their long fingers in the air. It's not menacing, not exactly. At least, I'm not afraid. But the gloom is oppressing, making the house foreboding. The house is big and white, all columns and windows, and I seem to be drifting toward it. Floating. The movement is not of my own volition.

And that's where it ends. Or that's all there is.
When I was a kid, I thought this was some kind of recurring dream that never went anywhere and wondered why I would dream it. I mean, why would I have this brief vision of this yard and house?

When I was much older, probably in my early 20s, my mom and I were going somewhere and travelling through north Shreveport -- actually, an area north of Shreveport -- and she suddenly told me to turn off onto some street and led me through several neighborhoods to some house. She pointed at it and said, "That's where we first lived when we moved to Shreveport." I knew, vaguely, that we had lived in some other house when we first moved from Texas, but we had moved into the house I grew up in well before I was one, before I was nine months old, in fact, because I learned to walk when I was nine months old. Before I could crawl. I learned to walk in the house I grew up in.

The house she pointed at -- a large, white, probably-old-plantation house -- was the house from my "dream." I recognized it instantly. The front lawn was extensive, the house far back from the road, and full of what were probably cypress trees. I don't know. I'm not really a tree guy. It would make sense for the area, though. All I know is that there were long, overhanging branches, probably full of Spanish moss, though I don't actually remember.

It was a surreal experience.
Not just because you're not supposed to remember things from when you're that young.
Also because I have no other associated memories from that place. Just "floating" through the yard toward the house, because I'm sure I was being carried.

It's not the only thought I have that goes back to before we're supposed to have cohesive memories, but the rest are mostly traumatic.

I remember the swollen spot on the floor in front of the refrigerator at the house I grew up in, because I remember standing on it crying as my mom left for work one day. But my grandparents had that fixed very early on, which means I was no more than two.

I remember my cousin pushing me off of my red tractor in the backyard and hitting my head on the steps going up to the back porch and the huge goose egg on my forehead.

I remember getting stung by a wasp on my finger and my arm swelling up and my aunt putting something on the sting that burned as much as the sting did.

I remember my puppy, the one I got when I turned two.
I remember him licking my face excitedly and laughing and laughing and trying to push him away but not wanting him to stop at the same time.
And I remember him lying dead in front of his dog house when I was not more than 2 1/2 and my mom not letting me go see him but not telling my why she wouldn't let me go see him. I cried. A lot.

I also remember sitting in my grandfather's lap as he read to me. He was a mechanic and always smelled of sweat and oil and, on the rare occasion I run into that precise smell out in the world, it brings up memories of sitting in his lap while he read to me. Little Black, a Pony and some book about an old blue truck that loved a cow and wouldn't let its owner sell her. Evidently, he would read those books over and over and over again to me because no one else would. My mom freely admitted later in life that she didn't have the patience to read to me, especially not the same book multiple times in a row. But my grandfather did.

I also remember my grandmother taking me to daycare with her. She worked at some daycare place, and I would go there with her. Mostly, I remember the bus trips home and how she would let me stand up in the seat and pull the cord for the bus to stop and that she would sometimes take me to some buffet place on the way home where she would let me get a piece of custard. The memory of that custard has become my platonic ideal of what custard should be even though I'm sure it probably wasn't really all that good.

And one from when I was three.
I remember the Watergate hearings being on TV and being very mad about it. Mostly because I wanted to watch something else -- in the specific memory, I wanted to be watching Star Trek -- but the hearings were the only thing on. Ah, the days of only having three stations to choose from!
Maybe, today, if more people were forced to watch StupidGate then more people would care about the even more egregious criminal we have in the the White House. Or maybe not, since it was quite clear that his criminality didn't matter to the people who voted for him as long as he fed their racism.

But Is It Really Just "Stuff"?

We just had the one year anniversary of the devastating Tubbs fire here in Sonoma county. Of course, that wasn't the only fire happening at that time; it was just one of many. You can read my perspective of what happened here. Anyway...

One of the things that gets said a lot about the physical losses people suffered is that it was "just stuff." Stuff can be replaced. And, to some extent, all of that is true. I said something similar about my own stuff back around the time of the fire when I decided that all I needed was my writing paraphernalia (laptop, flash drive, notebooks) and my people (which includes animals). The rest was just stuff. And I still agree with that on the whole as evidenced by my efforts during the past year to get rid of a lot of my collectibles. [If you're interested in buying comic books and gaming stuff, let me know!]

But! But...

The Museums of Sonoma County is doing an exhibit, right now, of art "from the fire" in honor of the anniversary. One of the things said in one of the pieces was, essentially, "Yes, but it was our stuff." It included a list of the things lost in the fire that were actually irreplaceable. And I could go a lot of different directions with that including doubling down on the original "it's all just stuff" proclamation, but, instead, I'm going to go in just one direction:

It's not just "stuff;" it's memories.

As I mentioned, I'm working on selling off my old collectibles and some of that is just stuff. It's like a byproduct of earlier days when I worked in comic/gaming retail and stuff that accumulated because I was collecting something or... whatever. Just stuff. But some of that stuff that I'm going through is more than that. Some of the things have memories attached to them and, when I find something like that, it brings those memories bubbling back to the surface of my brain (which, now that I think of it, is a gross image; I may have to use it in a story some day). Some of those memories are things that in all probability I would never have thought of again if I hadn't come across the item associated with the memory.

For instance:

There was this game called Mage Knight that came out about 15 years ago. It's a miniature battle game I used to play... which was really all I remembered about it as I started pulling out boxes of surplus figures to sell off. But, then, I found one little box of figures that were set aside from all of the rest, particular figures: They were my army from a campaign I ran with a group of friends back when the game was new. I would never have remembered about that if I hadn't found that particular box, because the memory of it was tied to the army.

Going through a box of comics recently (and I have a LOT of comics), I came across some old X-Factor comics which included issues from "The Fall of the Mutants" story line and the issue with the death of Angel and the introduction of Apocalypse, and I was immediately taken back to when I first got those issues and read them and what it felt like when Angel died and the anticipation involved in waiting for each new issue. Things I haven't thought about in at least two decades, maybe longer, and only remembered because I had a piece of stuff in my hands.

And then there's the fact that one of the places I grew up (my grandparent's farm in East Texas (and my great-grandparent's, too, for that matter)) burned down in some wild fires in Texas several years ago. Those places are gone, and I can never take my kids there, now, to see them, and I don't have any clue as to the memories in my head that may have drifted away in a smokey haze because I know longer have a thing in existence to call it forth.

So, you know, sure, it's all just things. And some things are replaceable, but the cross-stitch owls I made for my grandmother when I was a teenager (which is actually in my garage because my mom sent it to me after my grandmother died) is not. And the rope art piece I made for my grandfather is also not replaceable, and that was still at the farm in East Texas when it burned.

And none of what I'm saying is in defense of having stuff, because I do believe that, as Americans in the US, we tend to have way too much stuff. I certainly have way too much stuff, which is why I've endeavored to lighten my stuff load, but, also, it's not my place to devalue someone else's stuff with the declaration to them that, "Well, it's just stuff." How am I to know what memories are tied up in that stuff? How am I to know what they permanently lost? What memories are gone forever and what things can't be passed down? What things are significant and what things are not?

I can't; that's how. So, if someone is devastated by the loss of their things, well, that's okay. They get to be devastated. And if someone else shrugs it off with "it was just stuff," that's okay, too. It's not for me to know or judge. But you know what I think you can do? You can listen to someone tell you about the things that were important to them that they will never see or have again. You can let them experience that memory by telling you about it. Maybe, that way, they can hold onto it just a bit longer. And, really, what are we without our memories?

Unexpected Applause: "Memories"

Note: This review will be full of spoilers. The work is short enough that there's no practical way to talk about aspects of it without actually talking about those aspects of it.

In "Memories," author Alex Hurst has given us a bitter-sweet story of love and its importance no matter what kinds of gender boundaries may exist. From that perspective, it is well worth reading, this look back through the important moments of two lives that have come together. It's sweet and it's sad, and it could, really, be the lives of any two people that have come together in love and lived out their lives that way, which is where the power of the story comes from.

However, I found the vehicle for that story to be... distracting. And, actually, unconvincing. But, first, there is a brief introduction for the audience that spells out what's going on which I also thought detracted from the story. The story itself is really one of discovery or, actually, re-discovery by  the story-teller. I think introducing the story to the audience by telling us that she has entered a shop of memories takes that journey of discovery away from the audience, removing some of the power the story could have as we figure out what's going on. It removes rather than adds to the tension of the story.

The real issue for me, though, was the artificial limitation of "you can choose only one thing" which just made me want to know "why?" I get that the author is using that limitation as a vehicle to stroll the memories of the character and examine them while contemplating the importance of each, but that didn't stop the question of "why" from bouncing around in my head. It reminded me of those silly games people do:
You're stranded on a desert island and can only take one book, movie, food with you; what do you choose?
And I want to know, "Why am I stranded on a desert island?" and "If I am stranded on a desert island, what good is one book going to do me?" And "how am I going to watch this one movie while stranded on the desert island?" And "What? There's going to be a pizza tree there?"
So, yeah, this idea of the narrator only getting to pick one memory from her life before going on to wherever it was she was going really got in my way of enjoying the story itself.

Which may or may not be fair to the author and may or may not affect anyone else, but it did effect me.

Also, there is the issue of the ghostly store clerk, which I couldn't stop thinking about in terms of a static-like TV image after the description of it being like bad radio signal. If the memories are the narrator's and it's her store, so to speak, why is there a sales clerk following her around? And, if she has all the time in the world to choose, why does it keep interrupting with "have you chosen, yet?" Yes, I'm sure some of that is just my own issues. But I was annoyed on behalf of the narrator and wanted to tell the clerk to "go away and leave me alone! I'll call you when I'm ready."

And here's the problem with such a short piece: what I'm saying here makes it sound like I liked the piece less than I did. I enjoyed it well enough. It's well written. There are only a couple of grammar issues (which I can't even remember now, so they couldn't have been that big a deal). And it has a message that, probably, more people need to get. Okay, not probably, certainly. This is the kind of piece that might be able to give people a connection to how a real person feels about the issues being dealt with in the story, and, for that, it's worth the read.