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| Ghislaine Crawford left & Justine Crawford right - October 1987 |
Perdemos la memoria de cosas como las llaves de casa porque las usamos tan a menudo que las muchas veces que las colocamos interfieren unas con otras, de modo que el recuerdo de ayer de un suceso cotidiano tiene poco poder de permanencia en la mente. Jorge Luís Borges.
We lose our memory for things like our house keys because we use them so often and the many times we place them they interfere with other things, thus our memory of yesterday and a daily routine has little permanent power in our mind. Jorge Luís Borges (my translation).
At noon my visiting daughter Alexandra (she lives in Lillooet and just got back from a month-long trip to Europe with three of her Mexican sister friends) and I went to a nearby Dairy Queen. As I was looking out the window I suddenly remembered something about the building across the street that had apartments. I told her that many years ago I had suggested to Vancouver Magazine editor Malcolm Parry that I wanted to do a story on twins that would be written by my family doctor, Elliot Mintz (now departed). I remembered three sets of twins but the the two young girls who lived in that building I could not remember their names.
A while ago, while on the bed with my two cats I decided to go to my oficina. I looked at my files under T and found Twins. Inside (my daughter Alexandra had started my filing system in Kerrisdale in the late 80s) in her neat handwriting all four sets were listed by name!
I went to my Cs and under Crawford I found the contact sheets and negatives. Alas their first names were not recorded!
I went to my blog search engine and found under Twins a little piece I wrote and that is how I found out that their names are Ghislaine and Justine and that they were 17 when I photographed them.
The whole process tells me that memory is in some way selective. I can add to this that humans (and this one in particular) have a sense of place like birds. Somehow when I saw the building across the street I knew I had been in it. I immediately connected it to the young twins.
It all gives me hope that my forgetting stuff, like where are my house keys is all perfectly natural. After all, my hero Borges has said so.
