A Jolt of Memory, Out of the Blue
When you randomly think of someone from a distant chapter of your life.
Out of the blue today, I thought of someone I hadn’t thought of in at least two decades. Here’s how I got there.
I was helping my Mom with one of her Amazon delivery runs, when I thought about finding a gym with a pool. Getting into a pool would make it millions of times easier for to exercise, maybe get back to building some muscle mass, which is something my nephrologist (I have a nephrologist now!) mentioned in passing.
Long story short, there aren’t nearly enough gyms with pools out here in the middle of the freaking desert.
Anyway, that took me back to my very first swimming lessons. One of the fourth-grade teachers at my childhood elementary school taught swimming lessons over the summers, and I ended up learning from her. The entire situation was a bit awkward though, because that teacher’s daughter was in my class (we had the same class and the same teacher from grades 1-3, which is forever when you’re that age, but anyway. All I could think about was how weird it was going to be to be shirtless around some of my classmates.)
I left that school and that city when I was in the fifth grade, and I never came back. I don’t even consider that city the place where I’m from; so much of the formative bulk of my life happened somewhere completely different. Other than finding my very best friend from Elementary school on MySpace (and later Facebook) when I was in high school, I haven’t kept in touch with any of them.
But I found myself wondering about that teacher’s daughter, the little girl from my class that I barely remembered until this whole memory struck out of the ether today: me being nervous about learning to swim, being even more nervous about being out of my shirt in front of my classmates.
But even more than the clarity of the memories, of the face and the name, I wonder:
I wonder what her middle and high school years were like. I wonder how those stories went. If not for happenstance, I might have grown up with her. Maybe not as besties or anything, but our lives would have been woven together, at least a little bit. Maybe we’d be odd facebook friends who don’t really communicate, but like each other’s photos once in a while.
It always strikes me, in moments like this: what could have been?
I won’t know. Ultimately, I think it’s pointless to wonder too much. But I will wish her well and send the memory on my way.
Wherever you are, Chloë H. from Butterfield Elementary, I wish you and your mother well. I hope your dreams are coming true. Qapla’, Selah, and Amen.