Food for Life

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: People's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. -Haruki Murakami, writer (b. 12 Jan 1949)

What an interesting thought. One of the best things to show up in email five mornings a week is Wordsmith, bringing a.word.a.day and "A Thought for Today" from Anu Garg, who over the weekend wrote an apology, no that’s not the word the word is apologia, for his email overload. I agree with his view that one cannot have too many books, or dictionaries, or words. In fact, a trauma of moving is the dilemma about my books, and I’m going to figure out where to put the one remaining bookshelf. Linda wants a different piece in the powder room, so I’ll find another spot for the bookshelf.

But Anu’s thought. Besides the thought itself, the most important thing that struck me about it is Murakami’s word “maybe,” a really good word that if more of us used it more often as basic to our thinking and our being, there might be less hatred and violence. Because certainty is the greatest sin of all. 

Anyway, I wonder if it’s memory that makes us human, different from all others, mammals, animals, other creatures. Does a crocodile remember where deer come to drink, or is it something else, instinct or what? And I’m especially thinking of Mr. Tumnus' warning to Lucy during their first encounter, “even some of the trees are on her side.” But then Narnia is only a place of imagination and my heart.

I sit here in the wee hours of darkness that is so total except for the string of lights gathered round St. Andrews Bay. To the east several high buildings in town, three actually from here; in my memory there is only one, the Dixie-Sherman Hotel, gone these forty-five years. There's one across the Bay that may be the control tower at Tyndall. And the frankly impressive string of lights to the west, high-rise condos lining the Gulf of Mexico at Panama City Beach like diamond brooches. 

Looking east, I’m blessed that the Bay curves round to the right for me, instead of curving to the left and out of sight. Then, my winking jewels, the harbor lights that mark the channels, mostly a string of my beloved green emeralds across the Bay, but also the red channel marker to my right just off my balcony, in the blackness seemingly so close I could touch it. Why are the lights so vital? Not only for seagoing life, but in my mind? Is it really the fuel I burn to stay alive? Memories the lights keep alive? Not my body, but maybe alive in the sense of human and unique.

Awareness ignited by my late in life reading of The Great Gatsby and watching the movie, it’s in the mind, a corner of the memory that makes me human and more, and that Murakami now says may be the fuel I burn to stay alive. It’s not last night’s bowl of tomato soup and the tiny pizza at Enzo’s with those I love. It’s the memory of the evening. I can go there for supper in my mind anytime now. And not just stirred up, recent and active memories, but settled, some shared, some that I’ll take to my grave because I have been more than what you see is what you get. More and other. Theologically, that's what the Holy Eucharist is to me, to us Episcopalians, all of us Catholic Christians: anamnesis: this is that Meal and we are there. Memory. We do not forget. We go there for the Lord's Supper anytime now, again and again, memory, the fuel we burn to stay alive.

Recently a friend asked me to serve as a reference for the standard investigation to renew or expand a security clearance, and I did so. When the investigator came to my house for interview, I was struck with the shallowness of the questions. Perhaps if my answers had been more interesting the questions would have been deeper, more probing, maybe. In Navy years, I also had a Top Secret clearance at times, when needed, based on background investigation; and as this investigator asked and took notes a few weeks ago, it occurred to me that my security clearance had to have been based on what people saw and not who and what and where I am and have been, because almost nobody knows. Now, I’m just memories. A child running to leap into my arms. A pier coming closer and closer as I stand on the deck of a Navy warship. A bishop and priests mashing down on my head, pushing me into the floor. Other. Much other.

The Shadow knows. And with all their modern surveillance, maybe the NSA knows. Fat lot of good it will do them.

58F at the moment. It will be 61F at seven o’clock when I meet Robert for our walk. 70F this afternoon, my kind of Florida winter day.  


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