Forgetting Spring

M and I went for a ride, yesterday, to a Lavender farm in a place called Peace Valley .... top down (on the car) ... 75 degrees. 25 miles away, a place with mixed resonances for me. I had to stop a 10K, there, when my heart went faster than it had ever gone before and when the paramedics wanted to truck me someplace safe. I refused their help but appreciated the offer. Memories of riding around the hilly 6 mile loop on one of my 1974 Raleighs in maybe 2010 .... alone ... sometimes with others. ....................... M and I took country roads heading towards home and decided to stop for some soup not far from our home. Maybe it was seeing a mid-late-60's Triumph TR-4A or TR-250 (can't quite tell these cars apart, anymore) parked out front or hearing about some perturbations in the family ... something kicked in. Our minds are such curious places. In 1915, someone wrote a piece about the mind called das Unbewusste, the Unconscious Mind. There, the author said that feeling states occur in awareness as memories from deep inside, themselves, move towards awareness. He thought these memories took the form of visual film clips or images. He called them in his Viennese German vorstellungen, though his whacked out translator called them ideas. ..... ......... ........ Images? as they rise and fall into the recesses and folds of our CPU's ... our Central Processing units ... supposedly bring feelings to mind and life................... The soup was pretty good ... a kind of dumpling chicken soup .... and the Triumph was visible through the window of the restaurant. My brother-in-law had a TR-4A before their first kid born in 1966. She's now middle-aged and fighting against fracking in touristy-rural Sullivan County, New York and my Brother-in-Law is legally no longer my Brother-in-Law. ..................... Time passes. ................... I realized myself and shared with M that I had few-to-no memories of my Dad in the years untill he retired when he was 70'ish ... retired, anyway, into another job ... a sort of religious one. Simultaneously, I recounted how I had spent the past 40+ years working .... I reviewed the jobs. A long time had passed since we had married in 1965 and since my Dad, too, had gone off to work at maybe 430 or 500 AM 5+ days a week after my Mother prepared him breakfast. I knew he came home except, that is, for the year (1957, maybe) when he lost his job, and worked in Providence, RI, in preparation for bringing the family East from Toledo. All my very limited memories were stored in the things he taught me to do and the tools he taught me to use. Maybe, after all is said and done-done-done, the "empty flashbacks" weren't related to the Two-Seater Triumph but to the body-memories that surfaced when I cut the bottom off a swinging yard-gate so that it wouldn't get caught on the deck I built years ago. It was beginning to warp upwards and the gate was getting caught on it. Or maybe the wish for more memories had to do with my grand-daughter coming over with her Mom. Sophie wanted a grandchild, so to speak, of her own. There had been a Japanese Maple on the path to my office that had died of a strangulated root maybe 25 years ago. The stump remained. I cut it to 6 feet and used it for droopy plants in the Summer months. Sophie was born long after that. Before the tree went, though, its seeds were dropped or planted by a cooperative bird outside my office ... maybe 34 years, ago ... now, those saplings are about 30 feet tall. In any case, a two-footer had taken seed on the other side of my office .... grandchild of the tree that many of my visitors used in meditations beneath her .... and we dug it up for her to take this piece of "her" history to her parents' home not so far away. Sophie's Mom had just texted a picture of the sapling in its new home, arriving as we were sitting in the eatery. .................... Grandparents and grand-trees .... Grandchildren and saplings. .................. Dad, where are you, where were you and where are the other memories that keep you vital in my mind? .... for obviously you are.