Memories

 I don’t know if it’s a product of getting older, or what, but lately, I’ve been resurrecting a lot of good memories that I’d forgotten. 

Today, for example, I was putting up some fresh shrimp I’d gotten from a friend who went to the beach this weekend.  While I was working it brought back memories of doing the same thing on Sunday afternoons with my parents as a child (and hating every minute of it!). We rarely took long vacations, but usually went to the Mississippi Gulf Coast several times a summer for a long weekend.  Every time we’d go, my parents would save the room in the ice chest for fresh shrimp to bring home for the freezer.  That led me to think about the little “mom and pop” motel where we always stayed before it was flattened by Hurricane Camille in 1969.  And the 3 other families, friends of my parents’, who often went with us.  They all had kids around the same age as my sister and me and we always had fun. Good memories  

Then I ran across a picture of my maternal grandparents, Pop and “Big Mama”. The first thing I noticed was my grandfather’s shirt.  I’d forgotten that he always wore a shirt with two pockets.  The left one for his Camel cigarettes, the short ones with no filter. The right for the microphone for his hearing aid.  He was almost completely deaf, a result of the influenza epidemic of 1918. He had one of those old fashioned hearing aids with the microphone in his shirt pocket and a wire going up to the speaker in his ear. His shirts always had tiny burn marks from the Camels.  He had narcolepsy and would be sitting there talking and suddenly fall asleep. No warning, nothing. If he was holding the cigarette in his lips, as he usually did, it would fall on his shirt and burn a small hole. My grandmother fussed and fussed, but he never quit smoking. 

My girlfriend Susan is amazed by my memories.  She can’t understand how I remember so much about my childhood.  She has virtually no memory of most of her childhood and I remember nearly everything. She grew up an “Army Brat” and they moved every couple of years when she was growing up and she has literally lived all over the world. I’m sure that has a lot to do with her lack of memories. It would be hard to keep track of what happened where and when. Now and then she’ll ask me to “tell her a story”, one of my memories. I tell her a story, but I feel sorry for her.  My memories bring me so much joy and comfort.  It must be really sad to go through life without that. 

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