It's a fun line up..L to R=.Uncle John, Uncle Bernard, Grandpa Franque, Uncle Roland and my dad Max..

There’s no time like the present to recall the past.  Memories still exist within all of us no matter if we are riding on Vonnegut’s train of time and able to go back and forth on it as we like or freely stuck in Zen’s be here now realization: there is only the ever-present moment. Perhaps observation and then a memory of what we saw has always been our best means of survival.  This could be why we do both constantly just as Zen says: we gather all that glitters in our mind like crows, no matter how uncomfortable our nest get with all that stuff in it.

I say that first guy who  decided after watching 400 people before him step off a cliff and fall screaming through the air that he’d rather climb down it instead was a genius.  But memories can haunt or heal the soul and mind equally as well. The keen idea is to be selective about what and when we remember anything. There’s the rub: how to choose what we recall?

This is in part the crew responsible for all the trouble I may have caused you years later-Merry Christmas.

Actually scientists say what we recall is not so accurately fixed to the brass pallet of reality as we think. Any cop can tell you the eye-witness can be a most unreliable  plumb line to the truth.  Maybe playwright Aeschylus  had it all wrapped up back around 500 BC when he wrote: ” Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times.” And 2000 years more recently a wonderful storyteller of the south, Kathryn Tucker Windham,  spoke out to us when she reminded her readers that Happiness can not be earned or achieved. She said happiness is only a choice.

Dad taught me how to fish---:-)

So maybe what we remember, good or bad,  is just about the choices we make. This is why I never look in the mirror first thing in the morning: I want to stay on that I’m as young as I feel, nothing can bring me down, everyday is a new day, look out world here I come plateau ride I spent last night trying to get on. I mean if the past is just our imagination, maybe the present is too? This is where that famous tack comes in to play.

Any mountain climber can tell you they can sit on a mountain but not on a tack. So it can be the little things in life that ground a person to reality after all.

“Ouch! that tack hurt, and I remember sitting on it and I still feel it too-it all happened just as remembered.”

So as much as I’d love to jump into the vast vat of philosophical theories about time, memory, feelings and choice I might rather sit on its edge and take a moment to ponder a bit.  I’m certain tomorrow will come if I get to live long enough to see it and my past is just a memory. I’m gonna make my memories good ones no matter what. I hope you do too.  This seems reasonable enough, although an event  like 9/11 can certainly seem to turn this cow of choice on its head.  But even some good may have come out of that: the world woke up and now stands together to fight against ruthless behaviors with regard to a sense of justice, whether it is being done by dictators or civilians.

I remember Dad looking like this.

Dad like all his brothers fought in WW 2

Flat-out if a bucket of manure spills on my head I am going to remember how that may be what made me miss my train later that day which made me never catch up to where I would have been otherwise and this is why I missed making that plan that went down perhaps ten years later.  Who knows right? Most memories can be cleaned up one way or another to shine up to being at least doable ones.

So here’s to memories and to some great photos of them.

Mom and Aunt Lola. Aunt Lola could take 5 hours making spaghetti sauce but it was out of this world when done.

Franque

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