Memoryspeak

Memory. Memories. We exist because of memory.

Fifty-four years ago today, my grandmother Gertrude Weiner died. When her mother heard the news, she immediately suffered a stroke and died a week later. Gertrude was 38.

She left behind a husband, Ben, and two little girls: Toby, a precocious, bossy 7 yr old; and Susan, serious and shy at age 4.

Stories. In nine days we come to the anniversary of that Fateful Night, October 29, when my mother and father (1) met, (2) connected, (3) acted upon their desires, and (4) conceived me--long before they had ever conceived of me. For 18 years, my father existed for me purely as a remnant of my mother's memory o a single 12-hour period in the thousands of other hours in her life.

Every time I have a new insight about life, it instantly updates all of the old memories to reflect this new revelation. It's very Orwellian, in a way.

Recent revelations:

- Triangles. Love triangles. Connect two dots and you get a line. Connect three dots and a new space emerges. The human heart most resembles a triangle. The holy trio, triumvirates, the three musketeers—there’s something sacred about the number three. Put two people together and they can create the third; three is the number of creation, of love, of spring. Triangles are more stable than rods, three-legged stools more stable than stilts. I innately seek out threesomes when it comes to friendships. Interesting.
- I'm like Merlin the magician, living my life backwards. I feared death most when it was least likely (age 9, when I started having "that feeling" of imagining the world after human existence had ended), I grieved the loss of my father before I met him, and had a responsible adolescence before graduating into my wildly rebellious twentysomethings (woohoo!).