History's overexposure

Caterina Fake has a brilliant post about history's overexposure and our own memories.

But the image of history's overexposure stayed with me as I slept. When I woke I was thinking of great calluses that have formed on the body of history -- Waterloo, the JFK assassination, September 11, and the frailty and solitude of our own, personal memories; a vast, unknowable empire of memory of stories told by other people, such as that suffered by Kublai Khan in Invisible Cities. I've been thinking about this since I posted about the man's wife eating duck in Beijing, and Michael's comment about the scene in Citizen Kane in which the accountant recalls a woman getting on a ferry -- whom he as thought about every week since then for 40 years.

I lay in bed half asleep trying to remember things I hadn't thought of for a long time, and that effort produced memories of a party I attended in Narragansett, RI circa 1993 for my friend Nicole's younger sister's high school graduation; a boy in a house across from our hotel in Aleppo, holding up things one by one -- a pair of pants, a ball, a toy, a shoe -- laughing and gesturing, communicating in an obscure language of things.

Maybe that's why we keep these bizarre things called weblogs. Something to keep some of our memories in and something to look back at and bring back even more memories. Some of my earliest memories go way back when we lived in a single trailer in Rainbow Lake, Alberta. I remember the yard and our hideous brown couch and watching Sesame Street when I was just three or four. Tossing a red and blue football with my Mom. A sermon growing up about Fonzie. Getting a quad stuck up to its handlebars in the mud. My first shutout in hockey (can't remember my first goal, only my third) and getting shot at while in college but a person who intended to kill us (great story but maybe not for the blog). A couple generations ago, those memories seemed safer. Maybe because we didn't travel as much and leaving home meant moving a couple sections down the lane to start my own farm. Since Mom died and the Cooper's dispersed, I am not even sure where home is. Maybe this blog is home.