The Found Card & the Process of Remembering
Monday, August 01, 2016
Today is a British Columbia holiday. It is a lazy BC Day. It
is sunny, the afternoon is almost hot and my Rosemary is asleep with her cat
Casi-Casi.
I am attempting to file stuff that I hurriedly threw into
plastic bins when we moved from our old Athlone house five months ago to our
new Kitsilano digs. A flood in the basement 10 days before our move made my
throwing a hurried one.
Attempting to file it is taking longer because I
find stuff that I have almost forgotten.
Seen here is a card (it folds and I would write in the
inside) that might have been a Christmas card from 1973 0r 1974 before we left
Mexico City for Vancouver in 1975.
I look at the card and I think of Jorge Luís Borges’s wheel
of time. The spokes of that wheel have turned (inexorably) in a forward
(clockwise, is time clockwise?) manner. And yet when I look at the card I can
smell the air of Arboledas, Estado de México, and remember that both Rosemary
and I were wearing short white leather ankle boots that had a three-inch
foam-like sole. I note that Rosemary’s
eyebrows are very marked (I was the one who plucked them for her) and I know
exactly where it was that I seldom got my haircuts.
Moving that wheel forward again to today, as my Rosemary
sleeps, I am in a happy wonder that all four of us are here in BC (Ale, the
oldest in Lillooet, and Hilary now in her new house in Burnaby).
Burnaby BC is where we first lived when we came to
Vancouver. The pessimist, my Rosemary is unhappy that Hilary, Bruce, Lauren and
Rebecca (soon) are all back where we began. Hilary the optimist is happy that
she is back to where it all began for her.
One way or the other, with Rosemary and Casi-Casi in bed,
I can consider myself a lucky man and the wheel can keep turning. I look
forward as to where it might be in a few hours, days, weeks and months. And
like Borges said, I remember only that which I have not forgotten from my past.
The found card is part of the process of remembering.
