Ambiguous Memories

This morning I had to drive Hoyt to a train training yard, so I spent a lot more time driving into the sun than usual. It made me feel nomadic, traveling into the rising sun… just like my memories have been as of late. Nomadic. Changing. No longer the safe history that made me who I am today.

These feelings began when I started connecting with people from my past. I have always been bad about keeping in contact with people, and now that I have a presence on the Facebook and MySpace, I am making social webs with all my old high school, college, and even elementary school friends. Just looking at the people they know, some recent pictures of them just not being the young children I remember them being in my memories, my my memories feel so invalid and incomplete. They did not just disappear from the world as they did my life, not that I wanted that to happen, but that is just the way it goes sometimes.

And with all the genealogy work I am doing, making others recall the past, I feel like I am instigating memories either to change or resurface, and in resurfacing change with that particular person's new life perspectives from when the event actually happened… I am drudging up those feelings in not only myself, but in my family members. It makes me feel really glad that Hoyt is here, and he is real, and stable, and something solid to root myself to. If not, I think I would be lost in a sea of change and “squishy” (as Erica would say) memories. A life built upon squishiness… I don't know how to react to that but that word makes me really want some sushi.