larryhammer | More archeology of memories (Reply)

At the end of our year in Japan, my parents took the long route home -- across Asia and Europe. With an active four-year-old in tow -- or more often, running ahead in need of leash. I am in awe, though at the time it was just one stimulus after the other.

As in archeology, the remains are spotty, fragmentary, and sometimes shards seem displaced. The layers, though, represent not time but place. I can place these memories:

Philippines: The couple days on a private house-raft in a shallow bay belong here. Also the ride in a shallow motorized boat on a tropical river. I think also the elephant ride -- India would make more sense, but my memory insists on putting that next to the boat ride.

Hong Kong: A flash of red-flower curtains in a hotel window.

India: Cars in New Delhi. A visit by a doctor for my father and me, for some stomach bug. The Taj Mahal in stills: from down the avenue, seen in the reflecting pool, craning my head up to see from closer, climbing alabaster stairs, a dusky interior with an intricately carved screen, everywhere the scent of jasmine. Monsoons arriving while driving back from the Taj Mahal: flooded road, weaving around water buffalo in a pale blue Volkswagen Beetle that nearly floated away.

Nepal: A long bus ride through barren rocky hills on a gravel road, with a stop to stretch at a bridge I was told we couldn't walk across because the other side was in China.

Tehran: The excitement of being the first people being let off the plane.

Greece: A ruined temple's worth of memories -- climbing over blocks of the Parthenon, dinners in small harbor restaurants, pelicans in harbors. A week in Mykonos amid piles of white geometric buildings. The weathered lions of Delos. Octopussies: cool to look at, squirmy to touch, awful to eat. A footrace after dinner my father let me win. The boat captain's hat my father bought. Watching steep rock walls of a canal pass behind the ferry, which I cannot place. The ferry grounding on rocks in a tight channel, which I think was on the way to Thera. The joy that is dolomades and baklava and sticky hands. And everywhere, the multicolored sea.

Yugoslavia: Supposedly we drove through it, but the only memory that seems to fit is riding in a red car down an indistinct highway -- and that could well be from the States.

Venice: Puttering about in a lot of boats. Chasing pigeons in the Plaza San Marco. Tromping through a gallery (or two?). Teh Boredom (?!) that is visiting the studios of glass-blowers (!!). Bridges -- over and under. The color of dusky blue.

Unidentified place in Italy: A very small room of worn, rough-hewn stone, with one painting on display in the center -- in memory, it's a Bosch. Both visit and painting featured in dreams (but not nightmares) for years afterwards. If anyone can figure out where this might have been, please let me know. There's a good chance the painting wasn't Bosch (in Italy??) and my brain has conflated the image with the reproduction "The Garden of Earthly Delights" triptych my parents hung in the dining room.

A beach near Barcelona: sun sand sun waves sand play sun sand incident-with-telephoto-lens sand sun wheeee! Also, a theme park with scarycoolfunscary rides, where I learned the valuable lesson of waiting to use the ride ticket for the cooler ride, not the one in front of me. Crying when I realized the consequences of my choice.