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Published on 10/12/1998 All articles from this issue

Memories that defy time

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By Charlotte K. Jarmy

Reflections

Perhaps because I have been writing a review for the show "Tapestry," that is the word that comes to mind when I drift into a timeless scanning of the brain activity we call memory. My thoughts are much like a tapestry, but one that has no distinctive pattern. I find I am viewing the past through my mind's eye. Unlike a more organized form of thinking, my jaunts into the past are part of an assortment of images that have never formally been labeled by time and place.

The mind's eye is more like an extrordinary camera that shifts its point of view in a dream-like fashion; every picture from the past instantly becomes one with the present. In this fashion, memories of dear departed ones allow them to live again, and the aging assume youthful and lithesome proportions. I am forever grateful to whatever force has given us the ability to float in and out of time, recapturing precious moments in realistic color and motion. One doesn't have to pack a bag or worry about transportation on this journey.

I see my father, eyes closed, whistling beautifully to a piece of classical music he adores. He is middle-aged, somewhat rounded and bald, but to me this image remains as a powerful reminder that for my father music was the sweetest example that life was good. In that moment that I share with him, he is alive and happy.

For no particular reason, my mind's eye takes me to the deliciously surprising moment when my youngest son, Ron, a baby of about 4 or 5 months, bursts out laughing when his older brothers, Fred and Charles, batted a balloon in front of him. That wonderful moment, his first such outburst, echoes endlessly as the entire family dissolves into infectious gasps with tears running down into our mouths. Even now I hear the sounds as if I am still part of that scene.

Pop, Pop ... I see my mother bent into wordless, girlish laughter as she tries unsuccessfully to relate her old story about the gassy old man who walked around her little town at night erupting into noisy, machine-gun like sounds as he went, unaware that four giggling little girls were following him, falling all over each other with each eruption. My mother's face grows pink and beautiful before my eyes.

I float to another time when my young husband, Jules, stands in awe in front of our first son's crib. I cannot see his face, but his body is poised as if to scoop this tiny mite into his arms. His wondering awareness of this extension of himself is caught in that moment forever.

So many flashes of memory competing with each other. There is my dearest friend, Bernice, swimming powerfully to pull me out of harm's way as I struggle with water way over my head. When we can touch land, we hug, and I feel her strength flowing into me. No matter that today, she cannot clearly enunciate my name.

Here is another moment on a day much like today with autumn coolness beginning to pull the leaves down from the trees with each puff of the breeze. There stands Charley, my gangly teenage son, raking the endlessly falling leaves. He comes into sharp focus, as he hefts the rake out there on our driveway. Then, as I peek through the kitchen window, he drops the rake and with one hand explores the biceps on his other arm, hoping to find evidence of the slightest bulge that would make his exercise worthwhile. How I laugh to see this quietest of the three boys react with such pride to a very ordinary moment.

This tapestry of sweet memories brings present laughter and joy to a past that was not always filled with happy emotions. What a gift for me to be able to retrieve these moments and make them part of my present. They will surely last as long as I do. In fact, something in me wishes that their beauty can survive the test of time itself.