Corners of my mind

Today was a complete down day. Much needed.

One of the things I've been mulling lately is my weird memory machine, which generates pictures randomly from throughout my life. They just show up unbidden at unexpected times. The older I get, the more archives to pull from, the weirder the random memory generator seems. It just seems unlikely that all these fragments could fit together into one life.

Let's say a memory pops up of me in a surplice and cassock as an altar girl in Chester Virginia. Or drunkenly playing a party game after playing rugby at the University of Delaware. Or walking on a beach in Ireland with my first boyfriend. Or covering a fire for the college newspaper in Delaware. Or riding in a hunt on Boxing Day in Donegal. Or catching roaches in an apartment in Washington, D.C. Or calling the police when I was in an abusive relationship (that happened twice). Or driving from Kansas City to Philadelphia to start a new job. Or a skirt and vest my sister made me when I was a teenager that I just loved--black corduroy with ribbon trim. Or afternoons in the early 1970s spent talking about Readers' Digest articles with a retired couple who lived near my family in Chester Virginia.

My takeaway from all the memory bubbles popping in my fizzy brain is that getting older is going to be fun. I find these memories fascinating--trying to remember what I was like at these very different stages of my life, who was around me, how much I've changed (or not). Our lives are amazing when we step back and consider the richness of the journey--all the amazing people and pets and travel and food.

I'll close with a recent specific example. I was in a bathroom stall in PRI's office in London last week. A memory popped up of my first newspaper job in Daytona Beach, Fla. I remember sitting in a stall there and wondering how I was to get through 8 or 10 or 12 hours a day of work, every day, for decades to come. I wanted to hide in the bathroom, not be surrounded by chatty people. I found I wanted to get away from the noise and the personalities and the hub bub of the newsroom and the exposure I felt being in such a social place--with my boss never far away. How on earth would I ever make it in the world of work? Like I say, these memories provide a yardstick for how far I've come in some ways, and how unchanged I am in others.

Jan. 27