Skip to main content

Ruined Memories

J will be headed to college in a few months and my thoughts have turned to her childhood many times recently. Usually, it is about memories I deliberately did not capture on in pictures and video so I would have them perfectly preserved in my mind. When every other parent was video recording the piano recital, swim meet and school play, I often just watched and try to be present in that time as completely as I could. This blog which has been around since she was a little kid has no images of anything from her life - I wrote about events that meant something to me but worried that images would alter the way I remembered things. 

 Reminiscing over the digital footage of their childhood is usually not something the kid does - it is more a parent and family thing. To that end, not having an exhaustive digital archive of her childhood does not appear to be a big deal for J but I could be proven wrong yet. Maybe there will come a time when she wishes there was more for her to see and hear beyond my vivid recollections. 

 I remember loving it when my grandmother described the silly things I did as a toddler and how much reliving those memories made her laugh. Each time she told her story, it created a word picture in my mind and at each telling, that picture was a bit different. I was at liberty to imagine that incident she was describing how I liked. When I think about my grandmother now I miss her being able to describe me as I once was. The pictures we have together from that age don't nearly tell her story as she was able to.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more