I remember the name of the coffee shop downtown where we had our first date. It was an establishment trying to figure out it's identity: was it a coffee shop? A gourmet food bar, where you could fill half-quart plastic containers with pricey olives and egg salad? A sit-down establishment or a grab-and-go? I had arrived there early; I was wearing corduroy carpenter pants and nervously killed time penning a Metro crossword puzzle I kept in my back pocket. I had more hair on my face than I did on my head.
I don't remember her walking in, or what she was wearing apart from a slightly conservative knit sweater, which she would tighten around her chest as we talked. She ordered a tomato basil salad--cherry tomatoes, because she offered me some and I popped them in my mouth like gobstoppers. We talked about our faith, our respective conversions and reversions. She was so nice, though, so easy to be around. She may have been the kindest person I had ever met.
We got engaged five months later. I proposed on top of a hill at a park in the city over a picnic. It was nothing fancy or contrived, but I had some roses and a ring. Afterwards, we stopped at the grocery story for toilet paper and instant pudding since she was out of both.
Everything related to my memory is bits and bobs, but a complete aberration of timelines and markers. I'm not so bad as Guy Pierce in Memento, but it's a struggle. I attribute it to two and a half decades of anti-psychotic medications, but I guess you never know. It scares me some; I'm not a reliable witness of anything. I wonder if I will suffer from Alzheimer's in old age. I write to remember, because I so easily forget.
We went through the toilet paper and the instant pudding we used to make friendship bread that afternoon in mid-summer twelve years ago. But the roses remained, now dried and retained in the corner of our family room. Most days, we forget they are even there. If you were to touch the dragon's breath interspersed among the roses, it would explode like a puff of dandelion spores, fall to the carpet like a brush of dandruff. So we don't touch them. They are a museum piece to that iconic time in between my first date with my new love and my last day as a bachelor.
As the years pass, one after another, like the mosaic of leaves that fall year after year around this time, this material memorial remains inconspicuously in the corner of our family room. One kid, then two, now three. The baby of the family, now almost four, still has his baby voice, but I wonder for how long. I try to pay attention to the moments when he speaks, so I can mentally catalog the audio, but I know it's no use. I will forget, just like I forget what time of day or night they were all born.
I remember with our second, our first daughter, getting some air outside the hospital while my wife rested after the birth. There was slush on the ground, and as I smoked a cigarette in a Wawa parking lot I remembered saying to God, "I can't do this," and telling Him that He would have to handle it all because otherwise I would just worry about everything.
I don't know where the days go. Everything bleeds together. That was almost nine years ago. In six years my oldest will be driving. Eventually those voices will deepen and fade out. The noise and mess will be replaced with something else (order? quiet?) and I think then the sadness will settle in because I will want to remember every detail and won't be able to. Just these little snippets of memories.
Someone will breathe on the dragon's breath of my mind and the spores will just flutter off. We'll have the solid gold bands on our fingers, the hardened foundation of our vows, and hopefully the aquifer of our love for one another that will not have run dry. And we'll have the dried flowers in the corner, the museum piece of our beginnings that shouldn't be moved too quickly or carelessly, for fear of it blowing away like crimson powder into eternity.
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