Happy Birthday

So my eyes greeted this morning for the 26,645th time, give or take some leap years. To a child, that seems a number approaching infinity, and truthfully, it has taken a long time to get here. But nothing like the infinite Garden of Forking Paths imagined by Borges, or the room full of monkeys with typewriters, in the New Yorker cartoon, that given enough time to reproduce everything ever written, keeps producing new copies of The Art of the Deal.

I’ve had some lovely dinners with friends this week, with a family brunch yet to go this morning. Lots of conversations and catching up. Even some pleasurably rehashed conversations, refreshing thoughts already thought, and pinning them again in a place of prominence. 27,000 days-worth of conversations and events, so many simply quotidian and unvarying. But a lot of those days and thoughts and events and people are as bright as stars, simply because I paid attention at the time. And I’m left to wonder whether the only real waste in my life were the times I just didn’t pay attention.

If I were to describe my particular human condition, it would be a long, long, long internal monologue, punctuated with daily events that upset or elated me or otherwise impressed me. Accompanying those are passing words, smells, even views that seem like deja vu. Each of those is a trigger opening a cubby in a wall of obscured, perhaps even, wrongly-remembered events. But I pull those out anyway and savor them. I try to recall them correctly. Often, the event is surrounded by things that confused me at the time. Those, I really love, because we all now have been touched by the google, and the context of say, how the historical conflicts in the Horn of Africa came to bring about what I was seeing during a famine there in ’85, can be added.

So I spend time in rumination, like some old wreck in One Hundred Years of Solitude reliving his days of glory and infamy. Of course, that only adds to the sin of wasting time not paying attention to what is going on around me. But this morning, what is going on is the racket the crows are making and it seems a lot like the one they did last spring. Do I really need to know what’s up with them? Especially when I feel there are a million more cubbyholes of memory, all of which I would like to open. But the triggers are faded, or forgotten or never existed because I wasn’t paying attention.

Also this morning is a joint celebratory birthday brunch for my lovely daughter-in-law, Amanda, and myself. And to that I plan to pay exquisite attention.

There is this race with fading memory. The names and faces of people who once meant so much, are disappearing. I want to shock them back into being in my life. One of the reasons I write anything is to try and nail it all down while I still can. It feels kind of like the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, when Dave starts shutting down HAL, and as each glowing electronic key is disabled, HAL pleads. “Look Dave, I can see you are really upset about this.” And finally “Daisy, Daisy, Give me your answer do.”

I don’t want anyone to get too alarmed about me from this little bit of reflection. I suspect I will continue to be my usual bothersome self for some time to come. But, let us all just try and pay more attention.