Holding On to the Ordinary

Memories blur into summaries, but the tiny, specific moments are the ones that mean everything.

The Polaroid pic I snapped of my dad and sister that day, circa 1998.

While scrolling through my Day One journaling app earlier this week, I came across two memories from the “On This Day” section.

Nine years ago, I wrote a short entry about how my three-year-old nephew said hi to my mom for the first time. He was a late talker and is on the spectrum, so this was a really big deal. I snapped a picture of him from that day in which I’m in a recliner with the footrest extended and he’s lying horizontally across the top of my calves, looking like he was in a recliner himself. It was just an ordinary Saturday – one of those days that didn’t know it was going to last.

As I scroll back through the entries, there were many of those.

Seven years prior on that day, I’d met my buddy Shawn for half price wings at a place we frequented called Addy’s (sadly, the location has since closed). I noted that he bumped into one of his friends there and they chatted for a bit. It was good to see him happy because he’d been struggling for a bit. The year before that, I met Shawn for coffee with another one of our friends and we chatted about the crazy ending to the Viking and Saints playoff football game. I’ll take every specific memory I can get of Shawn right now. He’ll be gone for four years this summer.

Memories easily blur into summaries. Grandma becomes “a great cook.” Dad “loved photography.”

Instead, I’m clinging to the specific memories, like the time Grandma made a pile of bacon and set it on a plate on the table. My little niece loved bacon, so she subtly scooted the plate in her direction. Grandma scooted it back toward the center. And the tug of war was on, while Grandma tried to hide her smirk. Or the time Dad handed me some money after my Polaroid instant camera was out of film and told me to go buy more because one day, the pictures would mean so much to me. I ended up shooting a picture of my sister and dad that day that turned out to be a keepsake.

I don’t scroll to relive my life, necessarily. I scroll to keep it from becoming one big summary – to remember the way my little nephew reclined on my legs, or the way a plate of bacon kept sliding back and forth across a table between grandmother and granddaughter, as if those moments were trying to quietly tell me something before they slipped away.

Most lives are remembered in chapters, rather than scenes, because the scenes are so easy to lose in work, billpaying, doctor appointments, housework, and the like, but I don’t want mine to disappear without a trace.