& the start of the long slide to Christmas, as a long-ago friend used to say. His way of parking, which often worked, was to drive right up to the front rather than grab the safe one; he often got a very close spot. We called it the Jon-Eric Child theory of parking. Just a guy, a high school friend of someone I dated. As ever, I'm interested in what sticks in my memory & what doesn't, like the name of a boy I dated around that same time. I remember his big head, his very blond hair, & that he was from the Philadelphia Main Line. I had his name for decades & then one day a couple of years ago it was gone, unretrievable (so far). Who were all those people I have loving, intimate letters from & no memory of? I even found a letter I wrote that said "when I was living in XX," a town I would swear I'd never heard of. I know it's OK not to remember everything. I know it's OK not to know everything. But I also am sure it's sitting there in my head, shoved behind a stack of unimportant data. I don't know why it drives me crazy when I can't come up with facts. It drives me about as crazy what I do remember as don't.
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