How Many Memories Can a Woodchuck Chuck?

So I’m fifty-six, and I’m trying to find my head around this fact. How did I get so old? (Easy answer, by not dying before, but it’s still shocking.) I’ve been chugging through certain memories and feelings and realizing that they don’t always make sense. I have a distinct memory of being happy or unhappy in a particular situation or job but it overlaps with another thing going on in my life that was the polar opposite. My memories seem to run on different timelines.

Take this one; I remember working in a photo shop when I was at university in Chicago. I’m guessing I was nineteen. In this shop, people would bring their films in for developing, often just vacations photos and whatnot but we had one professional who did weddings and the like. It’s the sort of place that went the same way as Blockbuster video stores, gone to the past. No one rents movies or has film developed anymore. These types of stores have been chucked.

I’m trying just to remember the people involved. The boss (owner?) of the shop was possibly a Sue Barton, but I might have the name wrong. I do remember her being a pretty blond with a Jewish doctor boyfriend. She was converting so they could marry. They split up and she continued her conversion and became Jewish at some point. There was another man there, her friend and maybe partner in the business? who ate badly, potato chips and pizza and lots of colored sugary candy. I remember working with a young girl who had a job there but didn’t need it. Her family lived in on an entire floor of a luxurious hotel, and had for a couple of generations. They paid expensive hotel prices to be there year round. I remember her talking about a clothes shop: Blake’s. “Blake’s is dangerous.” she would say. I visited once and it was the $120 for a halter top sort of place (the equivalent now would be $450, I suppose.) It wasn’t dangerous at all to me. A halter top was half my rent and I actually needed the minimum wage job at the photo shop to pay my bills.

The thing with the memory of working there was what else I must have been doing at the time. I have a much better timeline for boyfriends and break-ups than I do jobs and living situations. I must have been with a guy named Peter while working at that photo shop. He did a lot of drugs but I didn’t, really. He drank and smoked and I remember trying to go jogging on cement city streets or swimming in early hours in what were, at the time, free swimming pools.

I remember liking the same sort of music as him, and liking his two sisters quite a bit as well. He came with a family, while mine was sort of all over the place, but our relationship was very unhealthy and it was going in the direction of becoming violent. That break-up was brutal, but I remember not being particularly unhappy at the time I was working at the photo shop. These two parallel memories don’t really make sense. If I think of that photo shop, I was happy at that time of my life. If I think about my living situation with this boyfriend, then I was pretty miserable. These things don’t compute.

I wish I’d kept better journals. I do have a box down in the basement with what I was thinking at the time. I haven’t chucked them out although I’ve been tempted many times. I should go back and look sometime, try to connect feelings and memories.

It’s important to me not to forget who I was, or who I thought I was. I think it’s cheating, otherwise, just to renew yourself and throw out whatever memories are inconvenient to your current construction of life. We are everything we’ve done and been.

This is even more true for our bodies. I am that person who went running on cement streets for years. Or my knees and feet are, most certainly. Be kind to your knees; you’ll miss them when they’re gone.