by I prefer Maya Angelou’s take, she says you can never leave. On Sunday, while I walked from my friend’s apartment near the UN to Carnegie Hall I kept coming in contact with my past. There was the old Mobil Corporation building where I used to work, the Chinese restaurant nearby, where I got food to go for my mother when she dying, (she had pancreatic cancer and she wasn’t eating well, so I always brought her some treat from the city, trying to tempt her with food from her favorite restaurants, or from some great ones she never got to try) there was the place where a former fiance worked, MPI (another place I used to work) which was right next door to the place in the picture below, PJ Clarke’s, where I used to have drinks, sometimes too many. On the other side used to be Michael’s Pub, where Woody Allen played every week and where I once went with my stepfather to hear Mel Torme sing.
I could name a lot more spots, the point is, whether the memory was good or bad, they all made me sad. It was a lot of piled up reminders that some things are irretrievably over, and of course that leads to to unavoidable fact that eventually I will be over too. I worry that I’m not creating enough new memories.
Sometimes I wonder if I had no way to store memories would it still be worth doing, well, anything? Would knowing I could never revisit the experience make it worthless? The ultimate present moment question.
That is such an interesting question. My answer is yes, but you just made me realize how much I would lose if I didn’t have my memories, as sad as they might be.
And who you would NOT be, expressing all the interesting things you share if you had not been where you have!! I have not seen you in MANY years but remember how neat I always thought you were in highschool and how much I enjoy reading your blogs now!
Oh, thank you so much for saying so. What a nice thing to say.