Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist. - Guy de Maupassant
I would add that it gives life back not only to the beings who have left this world, but to times and places that, as they say in New Orleans, ain’t there no more.
Being immersed once again in the air of the Deep South has awakened memories. The smell of the sweet olive warming in the sun, the mockingbird’s endless operatic warbling, the feel of the humidity on my skin and the arching canopies of live oak trees- all of it is creating a time machine effect. I’ve been thrown down the rabbit hole and as I fall, things from childhood appear. The descent is slow. The images are blurred at first. They remain blurred around the edges, none of them achieve full clarity.
I would like to believe that we never lose a memory, but that they transform over the course of our lives. Instead of mourning their loss, I’ve decided to embrace the idea that they are responsible in part for those vague, unexplainable moments in life, some lovely and awe filled, others not so much. They pass quickly, you have to be ready, like the servant waiting for the master who could come home at any minute, otherwise you can miss them. A wave of sensation like the scent of the sweet olive from some undiscovered location wafting into my backyard.
I suspect I miss many of them, caught in the day’s little trials and busyness. A couple of them so far have been crystal clear. Around my new neighborhood in Lafayette, I smell the playground of my kindergarten, Mac Donough 35 on St. Roch Avenue in New Orleans. (ain't there no more), and the memory of my little friend Jane Ranson showing me her baby toe. It must be a specific combination of flora and fauna that I come across that does the trick like Proust’s madeleine. It sends me right back there.
I believe that most of these moments of nostalgic sensation are the reservoirs of our memories that have been re shaped and re imagined over the course of our lives, transformed but not lost. I’m trying to stay awake for them, God’s little messages, nudging me on.