Day nine - Í Gær

To think about the past and not merely wallow in it can be a worthwhile endeavour, I deem. There's value in looking back and trying to see if you can still remember who you were, what you did, what you learned, what were your missteps. Of these I have many, I'm sure, that I'll eventually be looking into with some detail. But far be from me to do this just to simply chastise myself for things I can't change - the past is, after all immutable. The joy here, I think, will be me seeing how much of me I can still bring forth from those days long past. So, no time like the present, let us take the first step down these winding paths of memory's domain.

I have a couple of very early memories, and I can't place them chronologically : in one of them, I'm rollerskating by the door of a building in which my family lived when I was very young - maybe around three years old, I guess. A few years ago I was helping out my brother carry a washing machine he'd bought up to his apartment - sadly it was a very old buildding with no lift, and as it was during the height of a very hot summer, by the time we reached that, what was it, was it the third floor?

... Jesus, I went up those stairs so many times as a kid, it was my paternal grandmother's place, and I can't even remember which floor she lived in. Maybe it was the fourth? It always felt like an eternity going up those stairs. Anyways, by the time we lugged the machine up to his place, I was soaked in sweat, and soon thereafter we had to rush out to go buy a part the machine was missing - some sort of tube or the other - and as fate would have it the shop was right by that building we lived in when I was a young, young boy. A part of me could almost see myself in my red corduroys, with blue knee patches, and a chequered cap on top of an unruly mop of hair. 

But I also remember being with my family, which at the time meant its was just me, my brother and my parents - my sister was a few years away from being conceived, and my father drove a Ford Capri at the time, and I recall being absolutely enamoured with that car - funny that, as I don't pay attention whatsoever to cars or motosports, never have, never will. But I'm sure that had to have been circa the same era, though I'm also of the mind that at the time we lived elsewhere entirely different. In the time my family existed as a whole unit, we only stayed in a couple of places for more than a few years at a time. If I remember this right, I was already living in yet another place before I started going to school, and by the time I finished fourth grade we were already calling home to a different house.