My mind is cluttered with memories. I feel overwhelmed with the weight of them sometimes. I remember life before computers, the occasional soda fountain, the years of new wave music, times sitting on the Quad at the University of Illinois, my telephone number growing up, the first time someone gave me flowers.
My mind is like an attic, with boxes sitting in dusty corners, and sometimes something reminds me of a box that is up there. I rummage through the box and find the memory and a lot of other things that lived in the box with the memory. So I remember the Drovers’ concert in the student union, sitting with some friends in a little-used stairwell in the same student union, catching the bus outside the Union, my broken leg that necessitated lots of bus usage in grad school … I’m there exploring a moment of time with a cloud of memories and my feelings at the time.
At age 61, there are a lot of boxes in that attic, Some have been placed more recently than others, and those have less emotional resonance because those boxes are newer. The old boxes, the ones from my childhood and college, are the more poignant to go through. I was younger then, the world has changed from those days, and I can’t bring them back. But I can remember them.
Words Like Me 