by Brooks Riley
You can’t take it with you. That’s what they always tell you about possessions. When you die, everything you own will be left behind: Good-bye, beloved steel chair; farewell, feline; adieu, artichoke; bye-bye books, and so forth. All those objects, great and small, animate or inanimate, will exert their protracted existence on some other visitor to the kingdom of life, after you have moved on.
Like a going-out-of-business sale, everything must go. Everything? Not everything. There is something you’ll take with you when you go: memories. Whether you’re actually going somewhere is a question not only to be avoided here, but irrelevant.
Here are some of the things I’ll be taking with me: all my phone numbers since childhood (memory is a senseless hoarder); the time I threw my peas on the floor from my highchair, when the cook threatened to tell my mother; my fall down the steps of the Palais de Chaillot; the sudden whiff of Paris on the corner of Madison Ave. and 61st Street; accidentally meeting a childhood sweetheart on the roof of a lockhouse on the Panama Canal; the infra-red glow of instruments before dawn on the bridge of an ocean liner; the two courting praying mantises who flew into my Manhattan apartment and stayed for days; the moonlit pair of flying swans I mistook for UFOs; the baritone whoosh-whoosh of their wings as they flew over me; the opossum who watched me practice piano at night from its perch on the wisteria. I won’t go on. There are millions of them, most of them like confetti–tiny, colorful and insignificant.
Then there are the ones with heft (morsels for a memoir manqué), like the time the headmistress of my grade school told me I’d never be a writer (I was 12); or the two times Eisenhower waved to me from a limousine in Paris (when I was 6 and when I was 14); the time I stopped the orchestra during Act 2 of Tristan und Isolde (like stopping an oncoming train); the time I argued with Max Frisch at a dinner party over who composed ‘An die Musik’ (I was wrong, oh the shame); the time Jean-Luc Godard tricked me into acting in his test footage; the time I wept over Wagner with Susan Sontag during an intermission of Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Met; Abel Gance’s devilish compliment. There are hundreds of these, weightier than confetti, more like stones collected on a beach—some smooth, some rough, all memorable, to me at least.