A Traffic Jam on Memory Lane

Tea: Mixed Berry Green

Music: Crimson Jazz Trio, "Three of a Perfect Pair"

Time: Night.

I'm sure it's not an original thought. But for years, I've repeated that the price of a good memory is a lot of bad memories. I don't mean that in the transaction sense. I mean that being able to remember lots of things in great detail has its downside.

I have perfect recall of my father pouncing on a giant cutthroat trout that I took out of Fish Creek in Montana, keeping it from flopping back into the water after it landed on the bank and threw the hook. I also can't erase the image of him pale and groggy in Intensive Care, waiting for open-heart surgery that failed to save his life.

I remember with utter clarity my mother waking me up just before midnight on Friday nights, starting when I was eight, so we could watch old horror movies on a tiny black-and-white television that she brought into my room. And I can't forget trying to make it through the school days, in December of my senior year, knowing she had gone into the hospital for the last time.

I don't have a choice. Everything's filed away in my head. But I do have a choice as to what I take out, dust off and revisit.

I can choose to recall being wiped out, overwhelmed and cranky when I arrived in New York for the first time -- or being revived by a huge, rich, comforting plate of oxtails.

I can make myself flinch, recalling the time I accidentally shut one grandmother's hand in our car door -- or think of the times we picked Concord grapes in her back yard.

I can keep ledgers of wrongs done to me, and scan the pages every day, or focus on the good things -- the better than I deserved things -- others said to me, gave to me, did for me.

Things will come up unbidden, as memories do. And it serves no good to pretend that things didn't happen. But I have a choice as to what I let linger.

Every Picture Tells a Story

Tea: Lemon

Music: AC/DC, "It's a Long Way to the Top (if You Wanna Rock 'N' Roll)"

Time: Night.

Tonight, I took my son to a picture party for his high school strings group's trip to Australia.

There was food. There were, of course, pictures. There were videos (and, as usual, the homemade one was better than the one provided by the tour company).

And there was one moment that linked generations in my family.

My late father spent some time in Australia during World War II, on R and R from the brutal island-hopping battles of the Pacific Campaign. (His Marine unit fought at Guadalcanal and Cape Gloucester.)

He crossed the Pacific by ship, wondering if a torpedo would send his ship to the bottom and him into the water with the sharks. My son crossed in a jumbo jet, sleepless only because his seatmate ("some random adult from England") was snoring.

But one shot tonight -- a picture of Luna Park in Melbourne -- brought their trips together.

My father went there, escorting a young Australian woman whose sweetheart was off fighting. (It was an honorable arrangement, and my father an honorable man.) My son didn't go in, but his group stood outside the gate in the same place where his grandfather stood more than sixty years ago.

I wish they could have talked about Australia ... but I'll tell my son what I can of my father's time there. And I'll pray that he never needs R and R from a shooting war.