We can never entirely recover what has been forgotten.  And this is perhaps a good thing.  The shock of repossession would be so devastating that we would immediately cease to understand our longing.

2-26-2010

Train clacking on its track, blurred landscape, pink trees, misty hills.

La la la la la la

Do you know These are all what happened the night almond trees  blooming La la la la la la la la before last night?

No.

Train clacking on its track, pink trees, misty hills.

“I actually had a heartburn.”

Oh really?”

La la la la la la

Found, rediscovered, when I returned an old computer on loan and its information was transferred to a new computer, the old computer wiped clean.  A dozen or so micro clips several years old, taken by my wife of days I remember broadly and moments I remember not at all.  Their heartbreak lies for me in their resurrection.  Had I never discovered them, I would not have missed them.  But now, viewing the images, I want these lost moments back.  What happened next?  I wonder.  These beautiful children – they’re lost to me forever even as I tuck them in at night, read to them at bedtime, wish them sweet dreams and pleasant dreams as they wish me pleasant dreams and sweet dreams.  My daughter cannot finish the ritual without being the last to say I love you.  If I said I love you, again, she would have to say it, too, and we might go on this way until the moment . . .

Here and Gone.  That’s what it is to be human, I think.  To be both someone and no one at once, to hold a particular identity in the world (our names, our places of origin, our family and affectional ties) and to feel that solid set of ties also capable of dissolution, slipping away, as we become moments of attention

“Daddy, in the olden days did they only wear Afros when they went dancing?”

— Quotes by Walter Benjamin, Mark Doty, Shoshanna Hemley, Naomi Hemley, Margie Hemley, Robin Hemley.