I am half Thai and half American. I spent three years living in Laos, next to Thailand. For the first two years we were in Laos, my parents hired a pileang, or nanny, named Rojana, who took good care of me. Since she was Buddhist, I didn’t expect a gift from her at Christmas.
On Christmas morning I found a jar filled with at least a hundred tiny paper stars, folded so they were three-dimensional. They were blue and pink and glittery. Rojana had no money to buy me anything, so she spent hours folding those stars for a child who wasn’t her own.
Faie
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I know, it’s been a month since it’s over… It’s just I couldn’t put myself together and finish this post.
This is how our rubbish bin looked like after Christmas.
I know, people really should donate their gifts to charity, rather than to a rubbish bin. But nobody bothers. 9 out of 10 Christmas gifts we get are crap (if you lucky enough to have 10 gifts :)).
This is my memory about X-mas.
I don’t actually remember a gift in the last years I was happy with. So this is an idea I came up with. Christmas gifts recycle center.
You come to the place and swap one rubbish gift for another… Keep it for a year in the basement and give it to a person who presented you with rubbish gift in the first place.
So if you get the next Christmas a rubbish present from me, blame yourself for it.
Hazel
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YESTERDAY IS HISTORY
TOMORROW IS MYSTERY
TODAY IS A GIFT
I put these words bold because they were written in huge golden letters on a signboard mounted on an apartment block, above it’s name on the entrance. It was a striking contrast with the rather deteriorating building, so I looked around for a picture of Jesus (what else could accompany these words and explain the reasons for putting them there?). There was none. So I penned them down on an envelope and went back home.
Here we go back months in time. My wife made a carton house for our son. As he grew, we added some things and made fine adjustments, such as a ramp and spare room for cat, and shelves for his toys, and windows from carton toilet paper rolls. It was painted few times other and fit with doors and secret places, at best times he could park inside his tricycle. As this house suffered a lot from all the sort of games played in and with it and from our cat’s claws sharpening exercises, we fixed it with tape and papermache, and painted over again. Cat and son loved this box, and often fought for it. When we moved house, we couldn’t take it with us: it was just to big, too worn out and too odd.
So we dumped it in the street by the rubbish bins. No, nobody cried. But, I felt like an iceberg losing a big chunk of ice: it seemed like this box was with us forever, growing in size as our son and cat did. Before we departed for good, I wrote around it my goodbye, some looped in circle, as a spell, words:
YESTERDAYISHISTORYTOMORROWISMYSTERYTODAYISAGIFT
After that I came back home, found and reread Mike’s memory “Garbage Can Zen”. I wanted to read more. So I headed to his blog and found there a quote from Chuang-Tzu: “The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing; it refuses nothing; it receives, but it does not keep.”
Cheers, Mike.
abraxus
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My relationship to memories is rather ambivalent. I don’t really have anything personal against them, although they allow themselves to penetrate my thoughts without invitation and having the irritating habit to be memories of the unpleasant sort for the most part. But for mischievous as they might be, I still accept them as a part of me and see myself at the same time as a product of them. It can’t be all that bad after all.
Like my friend Boris says: I wonder where 99% of my memories got dumped. The Black Holes of Memory Kingdom? And I wonder why the most vivid ones of the remaining 1% are memories that I would rather put in the beloved ‘recycling bin’.
Of course there are good ones too, but inevitably they seem utterly powerless and without any impact if compared to the actual moment of happiness. Just a gray shadow of what once was a glorious and kaleidoscopic moment in our lives.
A wise man once said (I don’t remember his name) that 99% of humanity is either trapped in the past, reviewing and reviewing past experiences, or entangled in hopes and worries about the future. Only 1% (if we are lucky) lives in the present, the NOW. sad but true…
So, at this point I must say that I am not really a ‘past’ person. I’m rather a ‘future’ kind of guy…often worried about what might happen and afraid to take important decisions. I rarely evoke past memories because I can’t really get any pleasure in recalling them.
but still…I have my share of memories…and the one I would like to share here is not only the most vivid and the most extraordinary of them all, but it happens to be also a happy memory, a memory of a moment that changed my life forever.
Continue reading ‘Memory Garden’
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