Memories

The three days Jeckle and I spent cleaning out the house were predictably intense. After all, we were sifting through the remains of our grandparents, parents, and brother. The sheer physical bulk of what we had to get through was daunting. The first day in the basement I stood and did a 360 and felt immediately ready to quit without having begun.

But "a thousand mile journey begins with one step," I reminded myself, and started sorting and tossing. And, as you know, I soon realized that at least a third of the stuff was simply empty boxes. (I think there is deep meaning in this.)

But of course it wasn't really the physical piece that was the most daunting. It was the memories.

When I first moved to California, the house I was living in burned in the Oakland firestorm. I remember when we were finally allowed to go back to the "house" and start sifting through the ashes. Any tiny fragment of anything became a precious treasure to the point of ridiculousness: "Look! The handle off of that ugly tea mug that was in the give-away box!" And it was held up triumphantly and laid carefully aside to be periodically gazed upon with love and longing.

I can clearly remember the point at which I realized I didn't want any more memories and stopped searching. Everything I had already "saved" became tinged with sadness. Ultimately, I just wanted to get rid of everything.

That's what happened in going through the house. Initially, I enjoyed the "discovery process." Or, in the case of the things I had stored in the basement for 30+ years, the re-discovery process. I realized how much I had forgotten. I was reminded of people and events that were once incredibly important to me. But as time went on, it slowly started dawning on me how sad I was feeling. I didn't want these memories. They felt heavy. And it became increasingly clear to me that the memories were, literally (because they were contained in objects), dead weight.

So, I made a decision to keep only a few token items that were meaningful without having a direct connection to me: Daddy's hunting knife, mom's binoculars, one of the arrowhead frames, a box with a fish on it. Things that would remind me of my family but did not have personal memories. As such, I saved only one thing of Hyde's; a quote from a book by Ray Bradbury that he had printed out.

I kept it because I could imagine us, under different circumstances, having a conversation about why he chose it, what it meant to him. I kept it because I could feel Hyde's essential nature, that of a wondering human, amazed by the mystery of the Universe. I kept it because I could relate to it, which meant I could relate to Hyde, which, in real life, happened no more than 5 or 6 times. Here is the quote:

Ray Bradbury: Introduction to Infinite Perspectives

"But then the second sights came. Peering closer at the wondrous blue sphere in Space, we said, 'Where have I seen that face before?' The answer was: never. Until our time, cartographers fumbled their hands over terrains arctic and equatorial and made Braille transcriptions to steer sailors of seas and clouds. The whole of the Earth was a crinkled maze awaiting the rough guess of sea captains, pathfinders, and nomad tillers of soil. From these palsied reckonings, windblown prints sprang, hoping for safe passage but risking death. Airplanes did the first new chartings, jets sharpened the perception, but it was the Shuttle that lassoed the globe to tapestry darkrooms with manifest dreams. At 25,000 miles per hour, those bullets unraveled photo lightning flashes that drowned in chemistries rose as revelations. Now we fire off toward our tomorrows, Space Station One: Earth. Space Station Two: The Moon. Space Station Three: Mars. Then take off for the whole Universe."

At long last, I suppose, Hyde has taken off for the whole Universe.