A mother is a mother because she has children. I am a mother because I have children. I have two sons which makes me a mother of sons. They are both grown now, and yet the anticipation of my older son coming home reminds me of various incidents from his entire life. Not that it's any kind of obsessive reflection; it's more a flash, almost like a subliminal flash in seconds. It reminds me of something I saw on PBS today of these computers you carry around in your glasses or backpack. This is a research project of folks at MIT. You meet a person, and his photo and name flash on a tiny screen inside your glasses. Then when you meet him again, his name will flash on the screen, barely noticeable to the eye. It's probably much less than a second, yet it's enough for the brain to remember the name of the person with this fleeting reminder.
It was a fascinating program this morning, "Allen Alda in Scientifi American Frontiers" on PBS, August 1. All I discovered watching this program is my mind is like a computer. I say "David's coming home," and it triggers memories of details I rarely think about. For example, how often do I think about him riding his big wheel all around the big wraparound porch of the old antebellum home we rented on Napier Avenues in Macon, Georgia. For him, it was his own private freeway, and he loved it. I might remember this occasion with a photo or conversation. I rarely think of it; but all I have to do is open up my mind, and I am bombarded with multiple images like this. It's as though I have an entire novel of David riding his big wheel to view on a state-of-the-arts Kindle, but it's compressed like a computer chip or a zip drive.
So much for my son coming home! I'll see him on Monday, and that will be a good reminder he is grown up now. When he and his brother were young, it seemed as though they'd be young forever. I couldn't even conceive of them as adults someday. Now it's hard for me to think of them as anything other than adults except in those brief flashbacks when every memory is present like I'm wearing a computer in my glasses.
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I remember you taking a lot of photos. Do you have any of David on that Big Wheel? Maybe that's why you remember it so vividly. I wrote a longer post but it didnt take. Oh well. I was saying that it makes me work pretty well with models being that I had all those experiences as a child in front of the camera. The being still....and wait. All of those things. I was just watching a 70's horror film last night. And its amazing how difficult it was without digital technology to capture the elements of light and everything else going on. Anyway I have flashbacks of Atlanta too. Good memories and nice things.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if I do. I literally hardly took any pictures back then. Your dad took all the pictures, was our family photographer. I can see it though clear as if I had a picture. It's like my memories of you on the rope swing. It was so much an everyday occurence, I don't know if I got it on camera or not. I was taking pictures by then though. You were with that rope swing the way David was with his big wheel and record player. I doubt I have a single picture of David on his horse with all his little records, but if I were a painter I could clearly paint it.
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