Mechanisms of memories

I tend to forget some things easily, but mostly when they're not made explicity important, or associated with something emotional, in themselves. Names, telephone numbers, the date, class assignments, formulas. What I do remember outside of this gray zone, I remember with the utmost clarity of the a perfectly-cut diamond: the weather on a memorable afternoon now long lost to the passage of time, the feeling one gets when seeing shadows move across the face of a lover, the sound of an animal panting or the greasy feel of its fur running between my fingers, the look of overgrown shrubs in a ditch - skittering past the passenger window of a moving car, the smell of the dewey air just before the sun rises in the morning. These are the things that haunt me. These are the things that make my life meaningful and poetic, and I can't escape from them.

My odd memory does, however, serve to make certain tasks extremely difficult. I can tell a person, for instance, that on my 4th birthday it was sunny outside, or that when my dog was a puppy I held her 4-week-old miniscule body in my hand, high over our back lawn, and that 15 years later I opened the bag containing her ashes to find fragments of bone mixed in with the fine, gray powder. I could tell you that the driver of the old SUV that pulled my truck off Clam Beach had a scraggly brown beard, and that his wife wore cheap clothes, but they were great people. I could not tell you, however, what the names of more than handful of the dozens of teachers I aided in the lab at my old college, what I did with my time in more than a handful of days when I was living at home through high school, or exactly how many times I've been skiing with my friend Chris at Mt. Hood. I can't remember how to find the diameter of a circle, nor can I remember the name of a girl I dated for over a month when I was 19, or why listening to music always reminds me of a time and a place. I do know, however, that Austria and Prussia went to war in 1866 and the Austrians lost, that JFK was shot on November 22, 1963, that the East door to the laundry room at my old apartment complex squeeked when opened, and that whenever I turned the A/C or heat on, I could hear something rattling around in the vent in my bedroom. I know the box planters at Chris' parents house were infested with ants, but I can't remember when they threw them away. All the trips I've made up there fade into a blur.

They're funny things, these gray cells of ours.