Wild arugula is good for the memory
Mama just got an email from an old friend, JBC, a wonderful musician and singer, a writer, and best of all, a bread baker. Mama likes that, being an ex-boulangere professionelle herself and still a focaccia-forming, campagna-creating, biscuit-beating, pastry-pincher who can think of nothing more psychologically soothing to the soul than bonding with her kitchen. And also enjoying rich memories of the time she met JBC and other characters when she was young and foolish. She’s still young, maybe not so foolish, let’s hope.
I heard about JBC and his band when mama was ruminating to me and we were discussing my blog. Those friends she made in hippie time are friends still, and she’s writing down some of the incidents and memories of that time. After all, we are making memories every day, no? That cat kibble I discovered this morning at the top of my Annapura is now a memory, alas. And memories are, in a way, like food. Even the bad ones have a certain flavour, and you may not want to taste that again. That’s good info!
I don’t remember where I was before here, but it wasn’t where I wanted to be eventually, and so I went through a couple of weeks that aren’t filled with particularly good memories. But now I’m making really nice ones to mix in with those.
Mama has another friend who doesn’t like to reminisce that much about what anthros call ‘old times’, and yes, they are old, in a sense, but the moment before this one is already old, too. So what’s the big deal? I like thinking of my nice past here and also my even nicer future.
But anthros get together, especially when they are older and wondering if they’ll have any memory left one day (!), and they revive moments that each one of them sees differently, or possibly the same, especially if it was a particularly sweet moment. I don’t see anything wrong with that, because it’s so incredibly interesting and pleasurable—even the Rashomon aspect of it (that’s that story about something happening and four different views of the same event; I watched it with mama and papa (I see lots of films–also soccer matches!) on Apple tv and now I’m a Japanese film addict; plus they use a lot of cats in their art—that’s good).
So this friend, JBC, set off some poignant (another of my favourite words) memories, some hilarious, some sad, some just nice to have around when the grey matter is in free-float. Mama admits that even getting a bit maudlin doesn’t distress her–wine can do that, but what the hell, it’s human to do some of these things some of the time.
Hey, even that Adam and Eve thing is about memory, right? They looked back on that garden event and said, “Hey, everything was roses back then until that slinky thing came along, right?” And then Eve might say, “Well, those were nice memories, but look what fun we’re having NOW!”
So a little bit of past and present is a nice mix, really, and if I suddenly woke up with no memory at all of bad and good times, I think I’d feel sort of empty. I wouldn’t have had the practice to start filling up my little pea memory brain from scratch! So I’m going out in my catnip patch and stir up a soup of all the things I know now, with a pinch of memory to season the pot. A perfect afternoon…
