"In memory's theater, those years are restored and distilled." - MD

 

"There is a Japanese word for things made more beautiful by use, that bear the evidence of their own making, or the individuating marks of time's passage: a kind of beauty not immune to time but imbedded in it."

 - Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon

This morning, as the thermometer leaves the boundaries of decency and marks -32(Celsius? Fahrenheit? Does it matter?)  and the dog whines impatiently to be fed even though she is really just bored and can't understand why I should be on hand and not throwing something for her,  I wonder what are those things that imbed themselves in time. For his part, he means things - actual things - bowls and art and objects. I am fixated on moments.

I am thinking that it may be those moments we least nurture in our mind's eye that imbed themselves most soundly.  Not the harsh words of a father that we claim dispirited us and made us lose our way, not the tiresome regrets we trot out to ourselves as some form of punishment for waking up, but the sweet nothings of childhood that we banish for their simplicity - that brilliant writers seem almost inadvertently to resurrect for us. (Morgan Callan Rogers, Harper Lee). I'm going fishing for those memories. I am going to set them up on Memory's Stage and pull back the curtain. 

And I will take some thrill from the empty seats. And I will wonder, just a little bit, why this tiny bowl from my father (part of a collection of delicate china he brought back from the Korean war) keeps moving with me... and why I'd never noticed before that it lets in the light.