Why is that?

There’s a certain way that light strikes the trees, it splashes and bubbles down the leaves and spills onto the shade with the sound of a harp. The wind provides a gentle rolling like an electric strum as the boughs bend and sway. Time and my heart beat out a basic rhythm, and the meter of the music is borne out by the passing of distance and landmarks as bass, riding my bike through the park.

When moments are special, I find that I record the moment, even the whole day, with alarcity. With a surreal attention to detail. There are whole periods of my youth, from the time that I was 4 until I was 10, where I recorded every minute detail.

Sitting here, writing this, I can remember the dreams and nightmares that i had as a child. I can remember watching tv in the evening with my folks. Making Count Chocula and opening the closet door and basement door against each other to create a shawdowy alcove around the old tv at the end of the hall in which to watch Civil Defense programming before Saturday morning cartoons. I can remember how the air smelled in the late summer afternoon as I buryed a tonka dune-buggy in my sandbox behind the house, and how the shadow of the house was cooler than the direct sun, even on such a mild evening.

I remember bringing my mother out to the front door to explain to her the dream i had just had in which I dreamed there was a remote control kind of thing like an intercom system inside our front door, but it had weather buttons on it and two knobs that allowed us to call up tornadoes and lightening and snow, and I had dreamed that we used it to turn off three tornadoes that were coming into our neighborhood.

I don’t remember just “the story”. I remember the dream, in perfect detail. Then i also remember remembering the dream as I told my mother. I can sit here right now, and see how I saw the dream in my mind as i was making hand motions on the wall to indicate the remote control’s placement, and her curious interest in why I would imagine such a thing, and its otherwise inconsequentiality. I can remember the texture under my hand as I stroked the wall. The temperature, and even what my mother was wearing.

My childhood wasn’t the only time I recorded such long periods, but it is undoubtly the longest contigious, or seemingly contigious, sequence of detailed memory.

The moments, the weeks, the years that I remember are not the kind of moments in which one says “something important is happening” like in a car wreck when your senses heighten to deal with the event. Rather, these sequences start as otherwise mundane slices of routine life. The significance of most of these memories is the fact that I remember them at all.

Glueing a small, sharp, red rock onto an 8′ length of 2×10, along side the 4 other rocks I had already glued there. My attention to detail of which side of the rock got the glue, and putting it carefully into place, equally spaced from the others- eyeballed, no measuring tools. There is more to the sequence: deciding I am done, capping the Elmers, going up the stairs, closing the door, seeing it is around 7 in the evening, and I would be going to bed soon. Talking to my mom… it just goes on…

In fact, it now seems that what is unusual is that there are gaps at all. It seems that ALL OF MY LIFE should be recorded with such attention to detail. Why did I choose not to quicken to certain other moments that happened before or after the summer of my sophomore year? Why can I only remember a few of the moments that our foreign exchange student spent in our home in my senior year, but I can remember all of the times we were together away from the home?

But, I am intellectualizing to avoid my real feelings at the moment. I am listening to “Dear John” by Alanis Morisette – mp3, I keep starting it again when it ends. The song evokes such powerful memories for me. Not the lyrics – well, the lyrics DO invoke a certain thread of memories – like the artist and many others I’m sure, I go through memories of images and moments with past loves.

But the melody – the sound of her voice and the instrumentation….when I listen to that, I am suddenly in some of my favorite moments outdoors, I am in all of them at once. Its as if when I “learn” or “commit to memory” a natural environment, I encode those memories as music.

This song contains the decoding tones for alot of those memories.

And right now, I miss the people of those memories. I miss the contentment of those memories. I miss the perfection of the field, of the trail, of the sunlight, of the moment, of the planet, of nature and all kingdom authority in that mundane moment of passing by a park, or under a bridge, or past a wheat field, or a ball field. Its that stare, as you squint slightly and scan the horizon of tall grass dotted by trees, and you hear the hum of the heat reflecting off the green, and the gentle chirping of crawling things and the brush of the breeze…and its just a field. And its perfect. And I remember it always. To be evoked and invoked by a rock ballad 15, 25 years after.

Why is that?