2005-02-24
Summer Memories
And when the sunset clouds decided to leave, we'd wished we'd gone along with them--the same way our memories fly into the serene, pearl-liquid sky above us.
I do remember sitting with arms crossed and marveling at this. In the afternoon when the humid sweat's dried off your skin--sticking to the black GAP t-shirt. It's the tired feeling...like a true sojourner even though you drive an air-conditioned car.
But memories--summer memories--make us do crazy, unreal things. They change us in such a way, and we listen to those promising songs of midnight-white prose, and utter words never before uttered. Those are summer memories that drift by like the wind through branches.
We'd like to envision our life as a movie--like the camera angle that fades out/zooms out through the branches or the sky, and we're seen as a speck of dust in the distance and it's implied that: this is my life...little ol' me.
Some summers I caught tadpoles with Paris. Others, I became heartbroken. The Book of Summer: a collection of memories, whether good or bad.
We'll all think back on our lives one day and watch the muted pictures float like a strip of black and white film in our heads. Drowned by the silence of night and the menacing beep of hospital, life-support machines--I do think about that.
The smell of my hospital robe and what I'll be wearing when I die in God knows what manner. I can envision my wrinkly hands caressing pictures of when I was a young girl of eighteen, who later became a woman, who later became a wife, who later became a mother.
The silver-frames, string of pearls, quiet smiling, thin-waisted mother. Only now I'm a grandma...and I'll hold on tight and recall my summer memories.
The summer I met my first best friend.
The summer I lost my tooth.
The summer we went fishing.
The summer we caught tadpoles.
The summer I had my first date.
The summer I began college.
The summer I got married.
The timeline is as follows...cuz' you know damn well we'll all hear the jingle-jangle, tinkling-tankle of those little things that hang from our glass lamps.