Misty, water-coloured

I'd say that my memory's pretty good.  I remember things people said to me years ago, details of incidents that have happened.  I can even recite a story verbatim if I hear someone tell it in a dramatic enough way first. 

But there are some memories that we all have that never seem quite real.  Memories from childhood, or from years ago, or memories mixed with dreams that we can't tell apart.  I have lots of these moments.  An image that is sharp as pain but with a fuzzy border, all colours and imprinted feelings.  Some friends tell me they remember feelings, some, incidents with full narratives. 

Some are probably fantasy.  I have a memory of my grandparents, with their white-fluff hair, watching me playing in a huge two-storey ball pit among other sticky children.  I don't think I've ever been there, and they're both dead now, so I'll never be able to ask.  But the feeling has stayed and real and strong over the years.  The smell of the plastic balls, the way they bubbled round my knees as I waded, some denting in my hands.  

On the other hand, you get lucky.  I roll the moment round and round on my tongue trying to taste it ten different ways, sometimes for years.  Nothing changes or moves beyond that narrow window.  It remains distractingly, frustratingly out of reach.  Then one day, you find it.  Evidence.  And everything clicks and there is the tingly feeling of something old becoming something new, and something real.  There is no part of life more vivid for me than this - the validation of a long held memory, a piece of the puzzle sliding into place.  It is a special kind of happy breathlessness.

My earliest memory is from before three years old.  People scoffed when I said that, but I was surer than sure.  Sometime in my childhood, I had been given a yellow object, translucent and pleasingly tactile.  I remember staring deep into it until all I could see was yellow, right up to the corners of my vision.  I remember hearing my parents' voices and ignoring them.  I thought of that moment a lot, wondering if it was real.  My parents didn't know what I meant, but the recollection was so yellow, so alive that I couldn't let it go in my mind.  

Going through some family photo albums much later, I found a picture of a studio shoot that my parents had done when I was a little kid.  They had never mentioned it and I was surprised we even had studio photos, because my folks aren't into that kind of thing.  We clearly never had another session.  But there we were, bright against a blinding white background, then like a bolt of lightning, pictures of me, sitting chubbily on the floor, grasping at a yellow balloon.

I have another memory, this time from when I was about six years old.  My father had been sent to Australia on a work trip and we joined him for a while in Sydney.  I remember the hanging lights in the service apartment and the wind on a grassy hill.  

Most vividly I remember a museum.  It was dark inside and the floor was carpeted in parts.  My father taught me what static electricity was by pushing my youngest brother's pram along the carpet and making me touch the metal bolt to feel it sizzle against my fingertips.  We walked down a corridor and at the end of it, stood and looked over a balustrade onto the one exhibit that embedded itself in my mind forever.  It was a skeleton exhibit - a skeleton man in a rocking chair with a skeleton cat, skeleton dog, skeleton bird and maybe a skeleton mouse.  I could see all their bones standing stark white out of the darkness, fragile and precise as openwork lace.  In my mind's eye, the chair was creaking back and forth in time with the man's bony foot. 

I remember the taste of chocolate sticks with mint inside afterwards, and looking for them in Cold Storage in Singapore.

But even more than that, I remember the feeling of wonder, the start of an understanding of science.  I remember feeling full and complete and loved by my family and not having a care in the world except the 30 pages of Math homework I had to produce because my parents had pulled me out of school.  I remember knowing that we were going to the Blue Mountains the next day.  And we were going to eat scones.  And that I was happy. 

 

For the longest time I couldn't tell if this was a fiction.  I asked my mother and she said that yes, we did visit a museum but she cannot remember which one, only that we spent very little time there. 

As always, the image cycled and recycled and suddenly, when it entered my head last night, I wondered why I had never thought to Google it before.  Surely a skeleton man-pet exhibit in an Australian museum is pretty notable.

So I did.  

And I found this.

(C) John Merriman, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/merryjack/7853831644/sizes/m/in/photostream/

 It's still there.  And it made me cry.