Memories get better with age. Not the act of remembering, no, obviously that gets worse with age. But the memories themselves get better as time elapses. Traveling is a great example of this. I've had some truly awful times during trips, but years later it's the good stuff I remember. The bad things become funny or a somehow romanticized or relegated to that genre of "quaint anecdote". Perhaps it's just that memories get more extreme, are subject to hyperbole. Memories are fluid, flexible things, after all.
When I take a trip I like to do this thing I call "reconstruction" at the end of each day. I outline the places I visited, the sights I saw, the people I met. I compliment the list with sketches and little drawings. I do this because most of these things I will forget. I will forget the name of that historical landmark or the number of eggs that giant turtle lays or the name of the fellow traveler met along dusty roads. These may not be the things that stick out in my mind years later, but at some point I may want to remember them.
Instead I have an image burned in my mind of a young girl sitting on a bench in Paris under the Eiffel Tower, perhaps taking a break from standing in the interminable snaking line to ascend the structure. She wears a bright orange parka and has lovely flaxen hair that hangs over her oval face as she is bent over, inspecting the rings that form as she dips one shoe into a milky puddle of sky and steel.
Or the image of a cobblestone street lined with shops, bursting with young lovers and strings of Christmas lights overhead, turning around to face the smile of my own lover as I reach for his hand. These are the things I will remember. These are the images that need no recorded pictures or words. These images will stay with me and become only more innocent and full of wonder and romance over time.
Copyright 1/99 Jennifer Chung.
All rights reserved.
For a four dollar Coke, try Paris.
