Memory...All Alone In The Moonlight...

I'm kind of pissed at some of the things my brain has chosen to remember. Or maybe I'm pissed about the things my brain has decided to forget. There are huge chunks of my past, years of my past, that have just fluttered out of my head and fallen somewhere. It's like every time a strong wind hits my ear, a Meta-memory gets blown out the other side. I'm beginning to wonder if the memories I do have are actually remembered by me, or if they are only memories because I remember being told about them. And how will I ever really know?

I was at a RibBQ at my sister's house tonight and we were talking about our grade school, Whittier, and all the various teachers we had. My mom told a story about me in second grade, one I'd never heard before. It wasn't really a story as much as something I did. My teacher, Ms. Griffith(big ups to Ms. Griffith, who was hands down my favorite teacher in grade school) gave us spelling words every week. We had to not only spell these words correctly, but we had to use the words in sentences. I believe the general idea was to use 1 word in each sentence, but I fancied myself a clever girl, and decided to use as many words as I could in one sentence. Apparently, this was how I rolled in second grade, because the incident my mom told me about tonight was not the first, nor the last time I did that. Anyspellingbee, my mom told me that one time, my second-grade self took two of the words, "giraffe" and "reddish" and formed this gem of a sentence: "A giraffe is a big animal with a long neck and it might eat a reddish." No wonder I didn't graduate high school on time, I thought "reddish" was the same thing as a "radish". And I also believed for some reason that giraffes might eat radishes. I'm not sure which is more disturbing. Needless to say, this momma-memory is exactly the kind of memory that I wish I'd had, instead of heard about.

The memories I seem to have always kind of suck. For example, I've been haunted by a Jewel memory ever since writing that boog about Preferred Cards. I'm at Jewel with my mom, and I'm sitting in the bottom of the cart, you know, under the body of the cart where people usually stack a couple of cases of beer. I'm not sure how old I am during this memory, but I've got to be fairly young since I can fit under the cart. So I'm under there and my mom parks the cart near the deli department and takes a number, only the deli is closed and my mom doesn't know. She stands there for awhile, waiting, not knowing the it's closed, but I realize it and I start to cry, because I'm sad for my mom. The memory stops there, so I don't know why I was so sad for my mom, and I can't recall what happened after that. I imagine we left the deli and continued shopping because that's what people do at the grocery store. This memory still makes me sad though, and I still don't know why. My mom clearly got over it, she has not shown any anger towards deli departments since then and has purchased tons of sliced meat in the years that have past. But that suck of a memory is the kind of memory I get instead of remembering a hilarious sentence I wrote about a giraffe and a reddish.

The manufactured "giraffe eating a radish" memory will now become part of my memory repertoire, and I'm sure I'll retell it 1,000 before my life is said and done. Along with my favorite manufactured memory about the time I peed all over my parents floor in front of the mirror, but that's a boog for another time. Anypisser, while the manufactured giraffe memory has made it into the "memories I didn't have but tell repeatedly" file, no feelings accompany it. I think that's what gets me so mad about my selective memory. In what was a mostly happy childhood, I've chosen to remember things that reignite feelings of sadness, or feelings of nothing, which is equally sad. And I have enough sad memories from teenage years and adulthood, I'm not diggin these sad childhood memories close location to my surface. Now don't get me wrong, I do have actual childhood memories that make me fizz with happy, kind of like Pop Rocks when they first hit your tongue. But for someone who appears to be so happy, I sure do like to keep the sad nearby.