My First Memory

“But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”

Marcel Proust

                It seems that the past manifest in memory is inescapable, and allusive: a bitter sweetness that floats on the air like fragrant pollen. Yet I cannot begin to think of my life as receding into shadow against this nostalgia; I cannot yet linger in the solitude of recollection.  My heart would break, burn—and turn into a fine ash scattered against time.  Perhaps such things—memory—should be left to old men. 

For the purpose of this blog however, I will venture into the caverns of my mind, and seek out my first memory.

  This memory passes through my mind every so often, and was originally triggered on a jog, in Georgia, several years ago.

There are moments when I jog, that I simply stop in the middle of my run; and before I reach my destination, I collapse in a state of utter exhaustion.  In such moments, I often feel a sense of detachment from reality; it is as if my perception slips into a gapping black void—and then suddenly my senses bring reality back into existence.  Several years ago, when I was in Georgia, visiting a family friend, one of my jogs produced such detachment.   And when I came to: a serene current of air struck my sense of smell—a smell that I cannot describe now—and displaced my sense of time.  I was no longer on a jogging trail hidden beneath a dense wood, shrouded in a heavy mist.  I was still in Georgia, that much was certain, yet my mind arrived at a specific Image, and a specific sound:

 Looking out the window from the floor of the kitchen, my lawn is pillowed in a moist mist.  The smell of the ground and the moisture wafts in.   There is a golden retriever named Shannon sniffing the top of my head.  The mist dissipates quickly, and a heavy rain takes its place.  There are purple flashes outside, followed every few seconds by heavy cracks of thunder. 

The window flashes completely white…my mother screams…and then the loudest noise I have ever heard. 

Several years later my dad tells me an old tree was struck by lightning in our yard, and put a gigantic hole through our roof, when we lived outside of Atlanta.