“The sky is black and studded with stars. I feel the sand of the beach beneath my shoes and think of the summers in Provincetown with Jacob Kahn. How memory accordions time and places disparate moments next to one another like photographic slides on a tray!”

~ The Gift of Asher Lev by Chaim Potok

Memories…they do slip into our minds and line up beside each other, sometimes in a jumble. Often they are triggered out of the blue when one of our senses is sparked as happens for Asher Lev in the passage above as he feels the sand under his feet. One memory tends to beget other memories, connected in ways only the synapses of our brain seems to know. Sometimes the images of our memories are a jumble, but other times there is a theme that makes itself known. March will always be a month that plays in my memory slide shows of me and my dad.

Here I am sitting beside my daddy at Dunkin’ Donuts wearing a navy blue coat. This would have been one of our “early days” – so a Tuesday or Thursday – when he had to take me to nursery school a little early. I am eating my favorite (at the time) powdered sugar cake donut, and Daddy has that funny “dunkin'” donut with the little nub of a handle so he can dunk it in his coffee. (Do they even still make those?) That dusty sugar loved to fall onto my coat…and Dad would lovingly brush it off.

In this picture, I am with all of the neighborhood kids and my dad in the intersection of Calhoun and Grove Streets in Mishawaka, Indiana – best place in the whole world for a pick-up kickball game! [Or softball with plastic ball and that big red bat.] Our corner was home plate, and Dad was always the pitcher. Oh, how my friends loved to be with my dad. He was probably the “busiest” dad any of us had, yet he gave us the gift of his time – as well as instructing us on how to precisely time the planting of one foot so the other foot could connect with the ball just so….

Here we have a hodgepodge of fishing memories… With Grandpa Bill in a little lake in Liberty, Indiana, fishing for bluegill … on the shore of little Oly Lake (I truly do not know how to spell that) in Illinois working to reel in a snarky bullhead … learning how to get the worm onto the hook without hooking my finger … on “Monkey Island” fishing just to fish, maybe pulling up a tiny little sunfish … on a bigger lake in Illinois learning to use a casting rod (so different from the cane pole I still prefer) so we could catch bass … digging for worms in our little garden … stopping at the funny little bait shop being both grossed out and fascinated by all the wiggly things to put on hooks.

Memories can bring simultaneous smiles and tears….just as music does for me (as it is doing even as I type). Our stories are made of all our memories, the ones that hide deep within as well as those that are stored always near the surface, the hardest ones as well as those most precious. All of them shape who we are both individually as well as who we are in the context of our relationships. The sharing of memories, whether through music or words or other arts or even just by being who we are, is to me a precious gift.