Remembrance Saturday

It’s just been one of those weeks. You know the kind. The ones where the dead walk along beside you and ruffle your hair a little and fill up all those random spaces in your mind that the quieter times bring.

So this post might not be a whole barrel of laughs. You can just flick on past it if needs be. I won’t mind at all.

The other day would have been my brother Michael’s birthday. Well, it was his birthday, in fact… except it wasn’t. You know the conundrum. You’re familiar with it, I reckon. There is also some planning currently going on for a memorial for Patricia’s sister, Penelope, to at least partially compensate for the restrictions that we observed for her funeral back in lockdown, which so many partying leaders apparently did not.

It's been that kind of week where all these loved ones who are no longer with us seemed, somehow, close at hand. That included Mum and Dad, both now gone a reasonably long time, but still well able to colour a scene or turn a mind from one thing to another.

In fact, it’s Mum and Dad who are driving the admittedly-limited momentum of this week’s blog post. The thing that my mind is turning over, the thing that’s got me at my desk typing like this… well, it relates to memory and the curation of valuable memories. Yes, that, with a little pinch of Existentialism tossed in.

Still here? Man, you’re a patient one. I think I’d be long gone, if I wasn’t the one writing it.

Here’s the thing.

I have a particular memory. It’s a nice memory. It concerns an event that lasted no more than 60 seconds. There were three people there and I was, obviously, one of them.

Here’s the other thing.

Two of the three people who had some stake in that memory are now dead. That leaves only me and this tiny, quite insignificant memory.

I’ve never written it down anywhere. I imagine I might have shared it verbally with Patricia and possible some others, back around the time it happened, but, like I said, it’s pretty darned insignificant so I don’t imagine it’s stuck very fast in anyone’s mind.

Here’s the other, other thing.

As I’m the only one left, I’m obviously the only one who holds this memory. When I go, it’s gone. It might be small, it might not be earth-shattering, but while I’m alive, it at least still exists. The potential for it to be retold, to be recounted, it's still a thing. When that big red bus finally comes and runs me over, that’s it baby. Case closed.

The solution is simple. I will write it down. Here in this very blog post. It will only take a couple of sentences. Four or five at most. Doing that doesn’t bequeath immortality on it. Nobody’s under any illusions there. Computer servers will fail and rust, blog host companies will be soaked-up by bigger companies who will discontinue them. The web will be replaced by something else, probably something implanted right in our heads. Even though I write it down in the next few paragraphs, it will still eventually be lost in time, as every single thing ever will be lost in time.

But it gives it a little more time, doesn’t it? It increases the longevity. A child, a grandchild, stretching it, let’s say a great grandchild might happen upon the text on some dusty obscure archive and say, “Look at that. A genuine memory of times and people long gone.” That makes it worthwhile, doesn’t it? As Hamlet said, “It is meet I set it down.” So that’s what I’ll do then. Right here, right now.

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And that was the intention. The design of this post, inasmuch as any design every exists here. Do an intro, set it up and then type up the memory and move on. Done deal.

But it’s not that easy. Not quite.

Sitting here, with the Saturday Chilli bubbling away in the kitchen, I find I don’t want to write the memory down. Correction. I have no issue with writing it down. What I singularly don’t want to do is to share it via my ancient blog with Facebook and Twitter and whoever else happens past. I thought I did but, right on the edge of typing it, I find that I don’t. It’s tiny but it’s personal. And, much more than it being personal to me, it’s personal to the other two people in the memory, the people who are dead and gone. Except in these kinds of weeks when they’re very much not.

So I won’t write it down. I’ll leave it be, here in my head. And it may warm and make me a bit sad in equal measure from time to time. And when I too die, as I some day will, then the little thing will be no more, as so many other things will also be no more.

Now, as I think about that, that seems like no great hardship, no great misfortune. Whoever demanded that memories had to aspire to live forever? Whoever mistakenly dreamed that they could? We are, after all, “such stuff that dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded by a sleep.”

So I’ll leave it alone. Let it ride. It’ll be okay.

Sorry for wasting your time.