Yesterday I went out to lunch with some friends. We braved the 100+ degree heat, racing from the air conditioned car into the air conditioned diner. (Some people will endure the most unbearable of circumstances simply to eat!)
Being that the place was Greek, we went with traditional Greek diner fare: a gyro, spinach pie, a Greek salad (we won’t mention what Marie ordered but she’s young so she’s allowed to stick to the familiar).
We hung out talking, eating, talking, downing gallons of ice cold water, talking, eating, talking…
Dolores had stuffed grape leaves with her lunch. She doesn’t like them so she tried to pawn them off on the rest of us. I can’t remember the last time I ate that. It had to be over 25 years ago. I ate one. “These aren’t as good as I remembered them.”
Lisa said she didn’t like them but Marie got her to taste one. “These aren’t as bad as I remember.”
That got me to thinking about memories & how dusty they can get sitting there in your mind for all those years. Maybe dusty & covered with cobwebs isn’t an accurate description. After all, if something is dirty, you can usually clean it and it’s as good as new. It won’t look any different. I think memories are more like fancy wax candles. They sit up there in that attic of a brain. They melt. They warp. Sometimes they only bend slightly. Other times, they are completely distorted.
Yeah. I think I like the candle analogy much better. It seems to explain more accurately how my sister, my brother, and I can talk about stories from our childhood and remember it completely differently.
I can just feel things up there in my brain melting away right this very minute. Or maybe it’s just the summer heat.