Remembered Trysts

 [circa 2001]

Remembered Trysts
     by Douglas Remember-Me-Nots

Many of us humans remember our pasts with a tranquility that belies the phenomenal moment. We lie on a couch, for instance, and recall in a flash of peace and uproar that speechlessness that was the ’67 Pontiac Fury in which we and one other did not die as it plummeted over the bridge and down, near Neubergthal, into a dry creekbed twenty feet below, the shallow liquid mud with squished cattails around our nostrils, our legs pinned beneath the passenger door for two hours while we sang our pain into the night and knew our girl was dead. And, in the sleepiness of church on Sunday morning—with the preacher reminding us duly of the deadliness of pontification and the putrid flux of sexless being—there’s the deer we shot as it ran along the bottom of the ravine (on our first hunting trip). It trips through our mind once more and gambols there until the report of the .30-.30 and the dropping of the head forever. The knife from the belt, the puncturing of the throat, the glazing over of the eyes, the stiffening of the muscles that will soon be only venison, and our heart as we perform this surgery, all float about in our recollection as in a bathtub of tepidity and scum. And again, in a reverie brought on by nothing to do on Saturday afternoon but possibly the exercises we promised ourselves we’d undertake three times a week at 8:00 AM and find we have need of now to keep the stiffness from the knees, we recall Audrey in that town in North Dakota when we visited there as a 16 year old with our parents who had decided to travel south for once to see the Carlsbad Caverns. Her sister Eileen and she lured us (lured by their simply being nearby) from the park flowers, that mother and father loved and looked at and smelled hour by hour, and into the old growth where we walked and held hands, and they put theirs on our shoulders and legs in ways that made us dream later and welter. In the basement sorting screws, we remember Janet Baker-Tupper who’s upper body and lower body did not fully seem to match. They had about them a mix of colour that clashed, bland above, dark below. She graced Flin Flon, living near a lake, working in a restaurant, fighting men each and every day. Valerie Walker, the librarian from Exxton, New Mexico, met us in a bar in Brampton, Brazil, and we spoke for two hours together over millet beer and Pringles. She wore a slight dress of pale something with lace and Danish cloth above the breast. Her hair, the purple black of some birds about there, cut short and pointed at the outer extremities, remained unnoticed by us in our memories until this moment of screw-sorting. Memories fade from memory but grow in precision. Smells’ presence, especially, intensifies with the years.