There is no truth more difficult to grasp than the fact that the past exists nowhere but inside of us who remember it. We take our view of the world from the collective impact of all that we remember and we conduct ourselves in the world according to the understanding we have collected from those experiences and yet, those experiences have vanished from the world. Perhaps they are only alive, in any real sense, in our conduct.
I remember the feeling of sitting across the breakfast table from my father many Saturday mornings when we went to Talk O' The Town restaurant. I can recall the feeling of my size compared to his- I remember being small. I was 7 or 8. My mother would sit next to him and my sister, who is 4 years older, sat next to me. We would always get the same table and always sit in the same seats. On his factory worker salary, he would treat us all to breakfast and then, once we had finished eating, I can recall how his look of boredom, absently gazing somewhere at the wall behind my head would flicker, he would lean over to retrieve four quarters from his pocket, and he would plunk two in front of me and two in front of my sister. Off we would scamper, delighted, to a room past a heavy glass door.
My sister- older, bigger, faster- would always get there first and rush through the door, which I could barely hold open long enough to run through. Inside were a change machine and a Pac-Man game. The Pac-Man music would always be playing even if no one was in there. I think there was pinball too, but we would always play two games of Pac-Man each. On the other side of the little room there was another glass door that led to a bus station. I can remember the feeling of unsavory men coming into the room and hovering close to my sister, watching her play, and feeling the distance from our parents on the other side of the door.
And I also remember in that restaurant, how I would always choose the cheapest breakfast I could find on the menu, which was 2 eggs, sunny side up, with toast, and a glass of orange juice. They would bring a basket of foil wrapped jellies for the toast, which I would never use. It would be decades before I would look at a menu in any restaurant and pick something becuase I thought I would like the taste, rather than because it was cheap. No one ever instructed me to choose food that way in a restaurant-- I just felt like it was what I should do, because we didn't have a lot of money. As the younger child, I watched a lot, was quieter, and took in the balance of things. And I wanted to be good. That Good Little Girl persona still has residence somewhere inside of me and flinches at the recollection that I don't recall ever saying thank-you for the quarters my father gave us. I do think he smiled after us as we ran to play, though.
My father is gone now. Three of us remain from those distant Saturday mornings. Three of us- I think- remember. It's astonishing how much information about who we were and are as a family exists in those recollections. I think we went to that restaurant regularly over the course of maybe 2-3 years. And I don't remember everything about it. And I don't know how long my sister and I would be away playing Pac-Man or what my parents would talk about while we were gone. I don't ever remember them coming to fetch us, so it mustn't have been long.
It's hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that life consists of such experiences, and that these vignettes are what give shape to who we are. Those repeated, every day experiences in which we rehearse, with little reflection, how we respond to those around us, where we determine who is safe and who is not, what we look forward to and how we make our choices-- those are us. And even when those experiences are shared with those we love, they see them completely differently than we do. No one ever knew I was, at 7 years old, looking out for the family's bottom line in my little way (unnecessarily, as it turned out!) And I'm sure there are aspects of those same experiences that others of my family routinely experiences that I know nothing of. It's even stranger when those characters who people our memories are no longer around to discuss them. The solidity and reality of those memories seem less reliable and so too, perhaps, our sense of our own identity.
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