What You Remember

"What do you remember?" he asked, and before I had a chance to answer he told me what he remembered himself.  Not detailed stories, but rather categories of things that he remembered.   I haven't told this story which happened a good few years ago, because I didn't want to remember. Not the topic of the conversation itself, just the memories that it provoked. That is to say, what the conversation provoked me to remember, if that makes any sense.

My dog was still young and vigorous at the time, and we drove to the shoreline park, which, if memory serves, was actually called The Shoreline Park.  Its two high hills had once been the city refuse dump which was closed then covered with dirt, seeded with grass and turned into a park.  There are pipes emerging vertically from the ground in places there installed to release the gases that the garbage underneath produces. (Imagine, a garbage dump on a beautiful shoreline. Different times different thinking.)  A lot of memories are buried there, some of them mine, as I remember driving there at one time and dumping some refuse that the neighbourhood garbage pick up didn't or wouldn't handle.

We walked and played, my dog and I, then came down to the path along the shore.  It must have been a pretty day, because I decided to delay our return and sit down on a bench overlooking the Bay.  There aren't many benches in American parks to sit on, Americans prefer to be active,  moving, running, biking,  and those (benches) that are present are often unoccupied even on busy weekend afternoons. The benches in my neighbourhood park are most often taken by bums.

And if an American wants to sit on a park bench, he will choose a bench that is unoccupied over one where someone is already sitting.  At the Shoreline Park, there was a man sitting on a bench which I had chosen. The next bench was 200 yards away.  I sat down on the end of it and watched my dog chase a ground squirrel, a barely tolerated pest in this park. Then I turned to face the man and noticed that he was blind, his white cane between his knees, and a tear on his face.  How did he get here, I thought?  We were a quarter mile from the parking lot, almost a mile from the city.  Someone must have brought him here and left him.

"Are you all right?" I stupidly asked.   That's when he answered with the question "What do you remember?" Then he told me how the things that he remembered most from his life were failures, mishaps, roads not taken, mistakes, opportunities missed.  "And you, what do you remember?" he finally asked, waiting for an answer.

I told him, that yes, I remembered those same things, inexplicably, adding faux pas and stupid decisions to the list, but there were also incidents that were either entirely neutral or amusing, that I remembered for no discernible reason at all.   I didn't give him any examples, but I will relate tomorrow or when I get around to it two incidents, one of them a bad mistake, and the other a silly thing that I should have forgotten but haven't.