I have been reading a memoir by M.M. Kaye called The Sun in the Morning. It’s a long book and it feels like it’s taking forever to finish, but I don’t mind. I wish it really could go on forever. It’s such a joy to read. Part of my fascination stems from the setting (India and England in the early part of the 1900s), and part of it is the author’s style, so pleasant and endearing. Yet another part is that I’m amazed she could remember so many pieces of her childhood and weave them together into a chronological, coherent, and interesting whole.
It made me think about my own past, so much of which lies in a thick fog. There are memories in there, I am sure, but they’re so difficult to find. If I cannot locate those memories today, while my mind is still relatively young, then what chance do I have of it when I grow older? It is terrifying, the thought of losing an entire lifetime’s worth of memories. I need to go back in time, pierce through the fog, find those precious memories now and drag them back into the light while I still have hope.
The easiest place to start is in the recent past and during my travels, since I have photographs to jog my memory. The biggest of my trips so far is the one I took with Faithful Reader to England, and to begin my own memoir there is fitting. Where my bookmark stands in The Sun in the Morning, the author has just arrived there herself. For her, it was 1918 or 1919, just after World War I, when families long stuck in India were finally able to head home. For me, it was May of 2002, shortly after one of America’s most devastating events—the September 11th terrorist attacks—at a time when travel by plane had only just become “routine” again.
This will be my task over the next few weeks—sorting out those memories, writing everything down, and matching up the photos to the stories.