A Mind Run Amok

Memory Touring

At the end of My Dinner With Andre Wally takes a cab back to his cold apartment and as he looks through the window at the storefronts passing by, he remembers certain moments in his life.  There he is getting an ice cream cone with friends at a drug store, there he is meeting his father outside a restaurant, there he is with his mother buying a suit, etc.  It remains one of my favorite movie moments.

But lately I've been having the same experience and I'm not sure what I think about it.  In the film, Wally's memory tour perfectly illustrates how our ephemeral lives progress from one patch of holy ground to the next.  However, my actual memory tour keeps sending mixed messages, all of them troubling.  Have I moved into my personal home stretch, as it were, and I'm trying to make some sort of final accounting?  Has my mind just totally run amok, grasping at random memories like so many straws?  And most disturbing, what am I to think when I can remember losing a hubcap twenty-five years ago at the intersection of Hampden and Wadsworth, but I can't remember the errand that has placed me at said intersection in the first place?

Franny, Ken, Willa, and Cheese moved some time ago from their old place close to Sloan's Lake to a nifty little Victorian in the general area of 38th and Lowell.  That is what started this whole thing.  In order to get there, I have to drive by a lot of old stomping grounds, all holding old memories, both good and bad.

There I am being an ass to some hapless clerk at a 7-11 on the way to a soccer game.  I don't even remember the cause.

There is Franny in her stroller on the sidelines of the boys' soccer games wearing her blue bonnet, Chris and Nate running by in their green Wheat Ridge recreational soccer uniforms.

There I am driving to Vinnola's on a Friday night getting all the fixings for pizza to take back to our house at 3510 Teller.

There I am in Dr. Arendt's first office on Wadsworth getting gassed before a filling.

There I am at what used to be Mon Petit, a pretty good french restaurant, turning red with embarrassment when Kathie's mom literally yells "STOP!" as the waiter tries to pour the sauce over her chateaubriand.

I'm at Elitches--old Elitches--with Virgil and Jeri on Hewlit-Packard day at the park.  Virgil made sure to get there early enough to score one of picnic tables looking over the walk into the park from Tennyson.

I'm at Elitches years later standing outside the playhouse and Chris makes fun of me for wearing a white leisure suit.  What am I thinking?  Hey!  It's the eighties.

There I am at Regis.  It's 1966 and we have to run all the way up Lowell to Loretto Heights as part of freshmen orientation.

And there I am again just a few blocks up 50th at The Blue Guitar, one of those college neighborhood folk music places.  I'm five feet from Rene Heredia and I hear live flamenco guitar for the first time.  If you know flamenco, you are envious right now.

I'm at Marycrest High School in 1971.  It's my first teaching gig.  There are girls in plaid skirts sitting under shady trees discussing Animal Farm.

It isn't just places that set me off.  It's my family.  Whenever Brooklyn directs Sammy in a little playlet--like her cruise director bit yesterday--I see Chris and Nate as little boys, two actors in search of an audience.

When I see Willa already creating little playworlds to inhabit, I see little Franny in her blue bride dress already choreographing events in the back yard.

I'm about to drive over to Franny's for lunch.  I think I'll take a detour down 32nd and then over to 35th at Pierce.  Just down the street is Paramount Park where the boys and I used to go to practice soccer.  Franny had a softball game there once a long time ago.