beads & strawberries & michael jackson

I have this idea of memories being pulled one by one out of a swirling mess and into a clear light, like beads strung on wire at midday -- sparkling and luminescent from certain angles, almost disappearing completely from others.

Katrin, my dear Nirtak, recently asked if I would do a reading of some sort at her wedding this summer -- something from a piece of literature that is dear to me, or a poem of some sort, or something I've written or may write in the intervening months.

The first clear memory I have of Katrin is from the summer that I turned eleven. I was home recovering from a tonsillectomy and one afternoon during that week of recovery there was a knock on the door. My mother answered, and then called me out to the front porch. There were the Stamatis girls, Katrin and Yona, 7 and 5 years old (give or take), arrayed neatly and smiling in front of their mother Karen. They were dressed in matching flowery summer dresses (hand-made by Karen, I'm pretty sure), and had crazy curly hair billowing out from their little girl heads, and cradled armfuls of flowers (wild, and fresh picked) and get-well cards (drawn by hand in crayon or color pencils).

This is my first memory of Katrin (indeed of all three Stamatis women), though I know logically we must have met before -- otherwise why would they be bringing me flowers and get-well cards?

Dan ordered a salad at Max's Cafe last week and when it arrived garnished with slivered strawberries I couldn't help but tease him about his penchant for strawberry-laced salads. He looked confused at first so I described another salad he had ordered once at another of our dinners, a salad surrounded by sliced strawberries and crispy sweet kernels of corn. Eventually he smiled that endearingly crooked smile of his and we spent the next few minutes pulling bits and pieces, fragments and shards, of memory from each other until we had unpacked a mostly-forgotten evening and let it sit there on the table between us.

It was raining on that almost-forgotten night and the Heights (one of our frequent dinner haunts) was closed for a special event, so we ended up going to Deluxe right across the street. Dan had a salad (the strawberries and corn) and Nick had meatloaf, but oddly enough we never did remember what I had that night. Nick and I each had a beer and the restaurant was playing a lot of Michael Jackson, which we found odd. And then Michael Jackson died the next day and we, or at least I, felt a little bit haunted.

Which gives us a date, Wednesday, June 24th, 2009, and an evening that otherwise would have disappeared; would, for all intents and purposes, never have even happened. And it's not so much that it was an important dinner, or even a memorable one, but still, the return of it, its re-emergence from the shadows of memory, felt like finding a long-lost trinket, a small gift.

My mother sometimes bemoans the fact that she has an awful memory, that there is a vast blankness when she looks back over parts of her past. She doesn't mean blackouts or Alzheimer's or anything remotely so formal, but rather simply that she forgets so many small day to day events, and that it is these small, often mundane memories that add up to what makes us human, makes her who she is, makes us who we are.

I have a great memory for small things (strawberries, get-well cards), but I get scared sometimes about lack of context. It comes as a glimmer of hope to think that with the help of those around me (Katrin, Dan, my mother) these mundane things can grow out of their isolated moments, pulled out of shadows to catch the light like beads strung on wire, and expand exponentially into a whole history, a whole self.