Orphaned Memories
“But another problem interests me, too: the problem of orphaned memories….”
It’s bright, so bright it looks like an overexposed photo with just a few smudges of black: her hair, shapes in the distance. All else is a shade of white: asphalt , cars, hot sun in a grocery store parking lot. I am sitting in the front of a shopping cart; she is pushing; we’re going back to the car, or maybe we’ve just gotten out of it and we’re heading into the store. She has said something funny — or maybe it was me but I’m not sure if I could speak — and we’re laughing.
The moment is static: we move neither closer nor father away from the store. There is no sound.
That is the only memory I have of my birth-mother, who died when I was 2 and a half. She died in Febuary, in Minnesota, so the last time she and I could have been in a hot parking lot was September, when I turned two.
It can’t be a real memory — researchers say our first is at, on average, age 3.5 years — and yet it was never a photograph, never a story told to me by my dad or family.
An orphaned memory — I love that term — but one not completely orphaned, because it has me and I, it.
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The Great American Cooking Project
Notes from others: