If this seems to be becoming a recurrent theme, it is because I am experiencing a love affair with the past and all it has given me, but there are moments of crystal recall when no one else other than I am able to verify the memory. Both of my parents have passed, so I can't ask them, "Did this really happen?" Many of my contemporaries have failing memories, too, or didn't attach the importance to a person, place or object that I seem to have. As time passes, I find myself questioning whether my brain has simply implanted situations and images from dreams, books I've read or other people's stories in its convoluted recesses.
At this point there is nothing grave about any of that. I have what most people think is a phenomenal memory, and I am grateful that it has serve me so well for fifty-nine years. I know phone numbers from years ago, even if I haven't dialed them recently. I don't forget birthdays or anniversaries, passwords or codes. I can use King Philip Came Over For Good Soup to remember Linnaean taxonomy and the other tried and true mnemonics for planetary order in the solar system and colours of the spectrum. If you were one of the more than six thousand students I encountered over my thirty-two years of teaching high school, chances are if you give me your last name, I can retrieve your first from the depths.
I am six years old and holding a smooth wooden box with a tiny key on the bottom which when I wind it, sets a brass cylinder in motion. I can see the intricate works through the glass in the box. Tiny teeth on the cylinder pluck teeth on a single metal comb and produce tinkling sounds - a lively waltz. I can read the words on the paper label on the inside of the music box lid –– "Faust Waltz", Gounod. It is only years later when as a teen I am consumed with all things dark that I actually read Faust and understand his relinquishing of his soul to Mephistopheles for "unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures" that I realize what a strange choice this bit of melody is for a child's music box.
And I know I stood transfixed on the stairs ascending to the second floor of the house where we now live when it was owned by the Healys, examining prints in miniature of 17th century princes and princesses, portraits by Diego Velasquez and his peers, of little children garbed as royal adults in velvets and satin brocades.
I was fascinated by these tiny replicas of queens and kings; babies in rich robes, the Infanta Margarita Teresa, daughter of Philip of Spain. I can see the pewter-coloured frames and the diagonal arrangement Mrs. Healy has made of them as the stairway turns and rises.
This week, I asked Liz if she remembered what prints were on the stairway. "The Bartletts," she replied. Mind you, she is three years my junior, and may not remember the Velasquezes but it is the miniatures that are indelibly printed in my mind. Yes, the Bartletts came later, pastoral scenes from 1840's Europe and North America. Yes, indeed. I can picture them now that she has provided the information.
Perhaps memory is not so very fickle as I fear, but rather simply selective. Why don't I just relax, then and let it serve . . .?
