A memory is nature's snapshot

The Boston Herald

In the movies, music announces the big moments. An orchestra swells, there's a shift in keys, a violin wails and you know you'd better pay attention.

Real life doesn't give you a warning. The big moments come and go along with the small ones. We don't edit our lives. And yet somehow they get edited.

I remember being a kid and sitting on my front steps on a summer night telling once-upon-a-time stories with Janet Butler. I remember the heat and the mosquitoes and the crickets and the shadows the bugs made under the streetlight. I don't remember a single one of my birthday parties. I had them, I know. There are pictures. But the pictures in my head aren't in any scrapbook.

So who took them? And why?

I remember sitting in the back seat of my parents car at the Neponset Drive-in watching "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing." I didn't understand a thing about that movie. But I remember it. I remember an afternoon I spent alone in my back yard searching for a four-leaf clover. I remember standing at the magazine rack at Wrigleys, a store that shut its doors 48 years ago, reading a Little Lulu comic book.

I see these moments clearly. But I see them as an observer, from somewhere outside myself. I see some as still shots, others as moving film. How can this be?

The other day I walked with my daughter Lauren, her husband Dave and their new baby Lucy up the long driveway to our next door neighbors, the Merlins. We don't usually visit the Merlins. We talk while standing in our yards. But we had a new baby to show off, so off we went to knock on their door.

It was a familiar walk for Lauren. She started visiting the Merlins when she was 4 and didn't stop until she was 12. Bert and Mrs. Merlin - that's what she called them. Her older brother didn't visit. Neither did her younger sister. It was only Lauren who would have pounded on their door every day if I'd let her.

The bushes that separated our yards were small. But way bigger than Lauren. And after the bushes was a tall fence. So I couldn't see her as she skipped down the driveway. It was only as she ran up the hill to their house that she came into sight, two blond ponytails first and then the rest of her.

She was surprised the other day walking up the hill that it wasn't bigger. It seemed huge when she was a child, she said with wonder.

We knocked on the door and went inside, and for Lauren all the pictures she never took were there surrounding her.

"Do you remember when you came over to look at the puppies?" Bert said. And Lauren nodded. "And when Snow had kittens and you wanted one?"

"And how you always filled your pockets with candy," said Mrs. Merlin smiling.

"I remember everything," Lauren said, looking around and seeing not just what we could see but much, much more.

Mrs. Merlin held Lucy then and the slide show in her head was all Lauren. "I remember you as a baby," she said to Lauren. "She looks like you. It's like holding you."

"And I remember when it was you with a baby in your arms," she said to me.

And on it goes, someone smarter than we are taking the pictures we don't take. Snapping close-ups of moments that are so ordinary we wouldn't think of memorializing them.

Maybe nothing is ordinary. Maybe that's the point of the randomness of memories. A moment comes and a moment goes. But not always. Some last forever. Who knows why.