This is my Jessie, jumping in rain puddles.
It is a blue sky over Brooklyn today and as the rain clouds head out to sea cold air from the north is racing in to fill the void and bringing brisk and windy days. I used to dread these first cold days and the passage of summer because I enjoyed the heat so much but nowadays if it took a blizzard to get rid of these mosquitoes, I’d say bring on the snow.
A friend of mine, Jonathan Cott, wrote a book called Sea of Memory about his experience of losing a big chunk of his life memories. He had to be briefed about what had happened in his life over the past ten years. A lot of people on the world stage, and a lot of people he had known personally had died over those years. He had to find out about all of them all at once. As one interviewer summed up, "It was a massacre." It is an extreme example, but all of us have to return to what we knew and know it again. Memory as a sea brings with it the notion of the vast unseen, and the necessity of diving into the wreck, as Adrienne Rich put it.
Then there’s Jessie, two years old and with barely a puddle of memories as of yet. Seems pretty happy splashing.