“How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.” — Paul Bowles
This morning as I was vacuuming, I “sucked” something up. I heard it rattle and clatter through the pipe as it headed for the bag. This is an event normally unworthy of a blog post, but it was the thing that happened next that surprised me: in that moment I went straight back to being ten years old.
I got a Barbie for Christmas. She was “Crystal” Barbie and I loved her completely. Her dress was iridescent, white in some lights, purple in others. Oh, she was beautiful. Straight out of the box, she had golden hair and the most wonderful clear shoes – like glass slippers – I think her eyes were even purple. I remember playing with her and trying to keep her perfect, but being traumatized when I lost one of her shoes. I can still see myself lifting the hem of her dress and realizing that the shoe was gone. I looked everywhere but I never found it. We wondered if it had been vacuumed up, and my Mom checked, but it was too late. The bag had been changed. This morning, almost 25 years later, a clattering vacuum brought that memory back in vivid detail.
Why do we remember these strange small things? Why do I struggle to remember my Opa’s voice when I can hear my grade one teacher telling me that I had messy hair? Why did all of the times I was told I was smart or got good grades not stick as deep as the one ‘C’ that I got in writing in grade six? Is my attempt to decide on my truth possible? Can we rewire our brains to hold onto the good stuff and delete the bad or the unnecessary, or is there some point to our memory that I am missing? Could there be some lesson I have missed in the tale of the missing shoe? Giggle. I’ll have to ponder that one.
(Note: I just did a search for Crystal Barbie to see if I could find an image and there she was! Barbie’s doll from 1984. Bless.)
