ECHO 22/12/05

What is a memory? What is a person’s memory when say they get to later life? What is it made up of? I think of my Father for example. There must be so many little memories in him playing for attention, crossing different continents and countries, different marriages and workplaces, bleeding into each other. Then so many grander ones, or leitmotifs, returning over and over to become the sum of him, some better left forgotten but not allowing themselves to be so, fighting back, immoveable, embarrassing perhaps, crushing others. So many details and frightening elements here, so many tantalizing snatches elsewhere only half recalled in a fog of other overlapping memories getting in the way, confounding the truth, the actuality, the way it was – almost desperate when they get like that, desperate because they are misrepresenting the life –
A black and white cat crossing a garden first thing in the morning –
The distant hammering of workmen knocking wood into shape, chopping elements to make a new house –
The first Barn Owl seen at night in the halo of a car’s headlamps, eyes like two infinite black pearls in a whiteness so pure as to be sacred, and then the tell-tale turn of the head almost 360 degrees to stare at you questioningly before departing with such a definite and exact taking up of space, the huge arching wings and ghostly tremor of itself away from it’s perch into the dark –
The first Christmas tree brought home, carried in arms, an oversized and generous offering with that novel sense of being grown up, of almost being a husband -