Homecoming

This past weekend was the afore-reviewed Harvest Homecoming, a street festival in nearby New Albany, Indiana. The highlight of the festival for most people, as far as I can tell, is the food. So Friday afternoon, my mother came to pick me up at work and we walked down to Main Street, where three blocks were closed off with booths of all kinds. Most of the stuff there is of no interest to me--lots of country-esque tchotchkes, odd pieces of homemade "art" and other questionable materials--though there is the occasional volunteer opportunity. (It was at HH that I first got involved with Habitat for Humanity.) Because my mother was getting the chance to view the booths later that day with her friend Joanie, we headed straight for the first of the Harvest Homecoming institutions: chicken and dumplings.

It's funny how vivid singular memories are. When you experience something only once a year, or once in a lifetime, it somehow becomes more rich in your memory than something that you experience every week or every day. We all have things like this, I'm sure--birthday cake, the smell and feel of a relative you love dearly but rarely get to see, your first view of a long-awaited sight, or that elusive, perfect kiss.

Here's my theory on things like this: Much like the taste of chicken and dumplings or pumpkin ice cream at Harvest Homecoming, the things you have vivid, amazing memories of very rarely live up to the expectation. They take on a life of their own, so that the potato pancakes your grandmother makes (or, if you have my grandmother, the potato pankcakes and fried green tomatoes she makes) once a year never taste *quite* as good as the year before. They haven't changed--your memories of them have changed what they are.

And I don't think that's a bad thing. It doesn't matter if the second (or tenth, or one-hundred-tenth) time around isn't as good as you remember it being, because you'll always have that clear, shining moment of beauty and perfection. What's more, I think that the memory behind glass, where life and circumstances can't change it, is necessary. When my great-grandmother finally dies, I don't want to remember her like she is now--childlike in speech, helpless from Alzheimer's. I want to remember her the way she was when I was small--brilliant, active, and wickedly funny, teaching me about the birds that flitted about her 100+ acre farm and helping me and my grandmother pick blueberries in cool August dawns.

I'm not bothered by the fact that it will be different the next time I hike Mt. Acadia and see the sunrise from the first place in the US to greet the dawn. I wouldn't give up the first sight of Yankee Stadium for the same feeling in the next thirty glances. The same goes for the Prado, El Vaia de los Caidos, Westminister Tower, and the Pacific Ocean at the 45th Parallel.

I think what makes me not all that concerned is that I know thousands of other things will join those perfect, beautiful memories. The first time I see Tokyo, the first real "I love you," my first child's first breath, the first time I win a case... The possibility of future memories is endless, and, as Catherine of Aragon wrote, "I dwell in the possibilities."


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Then again, I could be alone on all these theories. Let me know.