Memory

My Fake Memoir

I want to meet this poet.  “We think of the past and present as being completely separate, but, in fact, your memory is something that can only happen in the present…”

Nice.

I have been thinking about memory a lot lately.  It’s the fault of my sisters.  Both my sisters have proposed alternate pasts for our family lately, in such amazingly different ways.  One of my sisters has been encouraging me to write a fake memoir.  It is a good idea, I think.

My favorite memory:

We are swimming at night in a lake in Minnesota and I am telling you a story.  The story is about people who gather light for half the month and deliver it to the moon.  For the other half of the month they bring the light back to earth along the path the moonlight makes on the surface of the lake in which we are swimming.

I don’t remember the rest of the story.

I don’t remember how to get to the beach where we swam.

I don’t even really remember if it was you I was telling this story to.

But it is a memory I go back to, time and time again.