Forgetting

Not too long ago, I came up with a long list of things to include in a book about being a parent. It seems awfully presumptuous now, but it was a good way to sketch out some things. I'm realizing now, though, that maybe the parenting book idea is part of something else -- an attempt to write, which will become a part of something about the attempt to write it all down, to record it all. Coming up with outlines, chapter titles, advice. No one wants to read that, unless it’s part of something else, something that is about remembering what it’s like not knowing what’s coming, maybe.

Like we felt with one child. Guilty, really, remembering anything before anything that’s happening right now, leaving someone or something out. But I’m so terrified sometimes of forgetting.

I lost a book once that I wrote, a book about some trips I took. It was in my backpack, along with cassettes from the floorboard and an old jacket of my grandpa’s, stolen from in front of a club in SF while we were inside listening to Bill Frisell.

I said something in that book about how it felt going into a Sinclair gas station near Little Big Horn, me and Steve Montgomery, looking for a map. Everyone sort of looking at us, me and Steve with the very red hair.

Also something about the trip back when I stopped by the side of the road because the urge was so bad to write. Something about my point-and-shoot not able to capture what I was seeing, about trying desperately to write it down and failing miserably. So many hours on the road, eating meatloaf by myself in Montana just outside Glacier, almost hitting, or really hitting, an owl maybe. I remember thinking "Shit. Now I’m doomed. I’ve hit an owl on the Blackfoot reservation." That can’t be good.

There was a little church too. That, I took a picture of. I’ve taken a few pictures -- that’s good -- and I have a lot on DAT. The turn signal on my '66 Biscayne, for example. Africa. Still, it’s not the same as my memory. I didn’t take a picture that one time, of the boy by the oldest tree in the world. He was standing there in the red dirt, and I held the camera up and saw him framed and didn’t take the picture. I’m glad I didn’t. I still have it. Same goes for the time in Nakuru when the battery ran down, from too much KBC broadcasting behind the house in Limuru. One kid, one of the oldest, played a song I’ll never remember exactly because it was perhaps the best thing I’d ever heard. I wanted it to be recorded but it couldn’t be. It couldn’t have been.

More recently, I ran across some old DAT recordings, one of an anonymous night at Enoch’s. Kenny Bill was playing, and there -- at the end – was Wendy. Her voice from 1994. Walking up to me, flirting. That, I'm glad I have.