Memory Hill

One other thing that the blind man next to whom I sat down on the bench at the Shoreline Park said, was "Tide is high today".  Without thinking, I agreed, saying "Yeah", not really knowing at that moment if the tide below our feet was high or low,  because the man made shoreline there is steep, an almost vertical wall of boulders, with  no beach, and seawater several feet deep right where it meets the rocks, so that low or high tide at that spot the level of bay water is always about the same.

Only then did I ask myself, "how does he know?"  From the sound or smell of the sea?  I made sure to check what I could check a few days later when the tide was low and couldn't hear or smell the difference. Perhaps he heard a weather report on the radio, they always mention tides.  No, the tone of his voice suggested it was something he discerned then and there. Whatever it was,  somebody must have taught him to distinguish between low and high tides using one or two of his senses, and he committed this lesson to memory.

Behind our bench was a paved hiking and bicycling path rounding the twin hills which as I had written before had been built from the ground up out of garbage, and turned into parkland once the city trash disposal site was closed some two and a half decades earlier.  Several feet of dirt cover must been hauled and dumped in there on top of the refuse, which was compacted by machines to prevent its settling down in the future, and vegetation planted on top of it all, to make it look as natural as the distant hills of this city.

My garbage from years gone by is buried there. That which the city garbage service picked up every week, and that which I loaded into my car, drove there, paid a fee, and dumped myself (most likely because the weekly service would not handle it.)  What was it? Furniture, a broken TV set, dead garden plant?  I don't remember, but it is there buried, crushed and it remembers.  Like everything else inside these hills, it remembers.  Sure, there aren't likely to be any archaeological treasures to be found here 2,000 years from now. We throw away mostly mass produced objects, rarely unique artifacts. But let's say that a future archaeologist digs up an empty Coke can, the one and only because we've recycled all the others?  Silly questions.

Objects remember and speak of us, even if our names are forgotten.  Just like those ancient objects of the Egyptians and the Romans speak of their owners.