Again and again I am amazed at the amount of information that can be stored in your brain – a huge, complex cataloging and operating system that we aren’t close to fully understanding.  At times the strangest things jog a memory out that I’m surprised is still in there.  Usually it’s something really mundane that I saw or heard 20 years ago, and for some reason it sifted back to the top again.

My paternal Grandparents died horribly about a year ago.  This past Christmas my brother and I put together an album for my Dad, my aunt and my uncle, incorporating dozens of photos of my Grandparents through the years.  Consequently, I have a large box of their old photos here at my place.   I’ve decided to use a number of these in the scene design for Girl in the Goldfish Bowl.

I can lose myself in these photos for hours, and I’m sure my husband gets tired of me calling him over to “look at this!!!” every five minutes or so.  Tonight, I was looking at a photo of my family’s kitchen.  It’s Grandma’s birthday and she’s in town.  She is sitting at the table, blowing out candles and two of my brothers are on either side of her.  They are young – 7 and 5 maybe.  They look excited the way kids get on birthdays, even when it isn’t theirs.  But what catches my eye in this picture is the knick knack shelf in the background.  I recognize the little statue animals, but then I see the ceramic wishing well that was a wedding favor from when my aunt and uncle got married.  Next to it is a little figurine of a Persian cat, looking up.  All at once, I remember that there was a tiny plastic yellow duck with a pink bonnet that had broken off some toy.  It was cute, so someone popped it in the little bucket hanging over the wishing well.  When the well went up on the shelf, Dad put the little white cat next to it, and turned it so the cat was looking towards the bucket.  “There,” he said. “Now that cat is just looking up there at that duck.”  This delighted me as a kid, like how perfect that these two ceramic things and that duck fit together so well to make a little scene!!  And every time I looked at that shelf, I would smile to myself because Dad put them there just like that, and I was there when it happened.

Why is it we can remember specific details about a room with such clarity, but not what room it was or what building it was in?  Or the way a lock of hair looked in a barrette, but not who’s hair it was or how long ago?

The feeling of being nailed with a suddenly unearthed memory is so unique, because no one but you can appreciate the weight that memory carries, good or bad.  It’s a hard feeling to recall.  It’s one that seems to exist in the moment, and later when you try to recall what it felt like, it seems loose and faint, because the sensation exists in the surfacing, not in the memory itself.

I don’t know yet how to incorporate this sensation into the design for Girl in the Goldfish Bowl, or if I can/should/could.  But I think that it has a strong presence in the life of the play.