Memories, where do they go?

 After selling our Slave Lake house, we packed our trailer and headed for Invermere hoping to find a new home for our retirement. Not far from Carstairs, a warning light came on our car telling us we need to stop immediately We didn’t stop but we did pull into a campsite in the above town, parked the trailer and drove to the nearest Toyota dealership. There, we were told that the oil pump wasn’t working and they’d have to wait over a week for the part to arrive. Shit. But that’s not the point of my story. The point is that while taking the dogs for a walk at the Carstairs campsite, I was listening to a book called “At the Existentialist Café, Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails.”  Still with me? The point of the café is that it involves hypothetical conversations with people who think about stuff like existentialism. Among the participants, sat Simone de Beauvoir, feminist, author, and sometime lover to Jean Paul Sartre, perhaps the most famous existentialist philosopher. But, thoughts of existentialism and living in the moment didn’t catch my attention on this particular day. It was a question, Mme. de Beauvoir posed toward the end of her earthly existence. That is, what happens to our memories when we die. Science tells us nothing. They just disappear. But I can’t help but think, really? My experience with memory is that it doesn’t work like a movie. YBut that’s not what it is. It makes connections with the moment and takes off in many unexpected directions. Take for example, my latest project, to go through my parents’ old slides and pick out gems to include in a memory book (for lack of a better description.) A few slides date back to a visit to the Calgary Stampede when I was four or five wearing a cowboy hat, holster, toy gun and what I believe were cowboy boots. Now, I have little memory of this event except getting lost when I turned the wrong way exiting the kids’ roller coaster. However, I do remember a love for playing a cowboy with Robin, our neighbour from across the lane. She was the Dale Evans to my Roy Rogers. I knew I had cowboy hat and I thought I’d owned a six shooter that had, at some point, been made verboten by my mother (or father) (or both) who used me to help make her stand against the violence depicted on television But there, in the picture, was my hobby horse and all the cowboy paraphernalia. Another picture showed me, Robin and another neighbour June, sitting in a kiddy pool. June was the girl next door. Which reminds me that, in pre-school years, all my best friends were girls and I haven’t mentioned Leslie, my best friend at the time. I liked the imaginary world of my friends who were girls but I also loved sports. My mom taught me to skate at the age of three and gave me a hockey stick at the same time to add spice to the activity of sliding on the ice. When I entered the house league at the age of six, I could almost score at will. Except when the goalie lay down across the crease because I couldn't raise the puck. So, after school, I’d play with my friends who were girls but during recess at school, I’d play soccer or football or whatever else was going with the boys at the time. These are my memories and they’re mine and when I’m gone, so are they. Like Simone de Beauvoir, it’s a concept I have difficulty coming to terms with.

Me, second from the right

The toy gun that disappeared