Last week I was talking with a friend about memory.
(Let’s pause here. I don’t want this blog to get confusing. Let’s give my friend a nickname. From here until further notice, I’ll call him Twister, after a character in an old cartoon. Ok, moving on…)
Memory is a strange thing, and I will be the first to admit that I have a strange memory. I don’t have a photographic memory, per sé; I can’t look at the pages of a book and then recite a paragraph word for word without looking, but I can, for example, remember exactly what I was wearing that time ten years ago when we went to see Mission Impossible: 2 in the theatre in Dillon, Colorado…and I can remember the date on the quarter I found on the ground, and what I ate during the movie. And that is not an isolated instance.
Certain things, I can remember with clarity, while others get lost in a mucked-up chronology. I couldn’t tell you the month (or sadly, even the season–Winter? Spring? ???) I lost my virginity, but I can remember with detail the last night I worked at the job I held junior year of high school. I couldn’t tell you the date I got engaged (either time)(!) but I can tell you the serving size and calorie count of probably over 100 packaged foods, which is impressive considering I haven’t eaten anything out of a package for 3 years now. Weird? Yes. Sad? Maybe, sometimes.
Interesting? Definitely.
See, the other night I was thinking about those years of my life that I devoted to the arduous task of dating. You know, meeting people, deciding whether I was attracted to them, waiting for them to decide whether they were attracted to me, letting them try to impress me in some ridiculous way, and stressing over whether whatever crazy thing I did to impress them worked.
And I remembered one particular time in my life when I was downright bored. I wasn’t really interested in anybody, the dating scene sucked, and my job was boring. Until one night, a Jared Leto lookalike walkied in. And proceeded to flirt with me. He asked me to “hang out” (the closest I guess you really get to an actual date when you are 19 years old?) and I said yes. Turns out, we both had pet snakes. (What a thing to have in common, right? That…and NOTHING else, it turns out. ) Our “hang out” turned into a trip to the pet store, where Mr. Wonderful proceeded to grab the rosy boa I had been admiring out of her cage and place her down his pants before hightailing it out of the store. Mortified, I followed. In the car, he gave me my “gift” (from his pants, remember?) and I silently sat in the passenger seat on the way home, unsure what to do. (Turns out, I did a lot of nothing. I was too scared to actually go back there, so I took care of her. And named her Gank. See, back then, I even had a sense of humor.)
I never spoke to that guy again, even though he left me several messages (many to the tune of “…but I put a snake down my pants for you!”) and showed up at my work a couple more times. When I moved to Colorado, Gank found a home with my friend Nick and I am sure she lived a full, happy snake life.
Memory (at least mine) is a very strange thing, indeed.
