I lament the attrition of my early childhood memories. What seemed so bright back then has been smudged and deadened by the passage of time. I'm left only with vague notions and fleeting deja vu as I stumble on through an adult's life.
This is one of the beauties of parenthood I guess - that we can relive our childhood memories vicariously through our children. Or perhaps that we can relive our romanticised version of our childhoods at least...
A close friend told me once of a magical parental moment that he'd had with his daughter, now grown up, on the top deck of a bus waiting at traffic lights in Glasgow. Out of the blue, his four year old said "Keep left". He was confused at first, but then noticed the road sign which commanded the driver to "Keep Left".
In this moment he was awestruck that symbols and glyphs that had previously been only shapes, had begun to take on a meaning for his daughter and be imbibed with metaphor.
This morning, as I checked my email, Meg nonchalantly walked past me and said "Google Mail" to herself.
Truly a child of her time.
1 comment:
We all have a tendency to create a myth of our own life, a blurring here, a half truth there. Memories are kind of like viewing life through one camera angle sometimes to be surprised by what the other cameras saw.
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