We buy stone fruit at the farmer’s market because my husband is nostalgic for the plums he would eat by the lake in his childhood, and we think out loud that if we put peaches on our morning toast that the novelty might slow down time.
We eat one of those peaches with first-of-the-season figs and kiwis in the sand on a towel with bright red stripes and the Pacific in view. I remark how happy I am that we’ve finally gotten out to the beach to take in the sight and sound of the summer ocean, and my husband responds that we’d walked by the water the prior two mornings, asking without asking where has my mind been?
Attention, like memory, is a fickle thing.
I’m reminded of this again days later walking through my old Venice neighborhood with fresh scoops of ice cream to celebrate a Friday night. The seasonal flavor is cantaloupe, and like a true Proustian memory it transports me to a time when my Odad would eat a scoop of vanilla bean out of a freshly cored melon. He passed in January of 2020, before everything in the world went extraordinarily quiet and then got incredibly loud.
I’ve had the volume up in my car lately, listening to new releases like DAISIES and Dandelions, which is an odd way of expressing that I recognize in myself a craving for the things of this world that are simple and beautiful and alive. Flowers in every room, or better yet a garden to lose my hands in.
I spend half of June in Colorado admiring my parents’ daylilies and powder blue hydrangeas. I ask my mother one day about everything her and my father are growing and while naming the flora of their now sanctuary she tells me that they moved in with only dirt and without a plan. I wonder if she is saying in a way that only a mother can to stop worrying about what’s next and enjoy what it feels like to live my life right now.
I try it on for size at a neighborhood summer solstice party where I watch a live band coax a hundred-something retirees to bust out the moves they thought they’d left in the seventies. I’ve just seen The Life of Chuck in theaters, and so I take to heart the lesson that sometimes you have to just dance. As I reach for my father to pull him out of his seat, he warns me he’ll make a fool of us. But I know I have nothing to fear because we’ve already danced to Paul Simon at my wedding two years ago, and in our living room to Natalie Cole two decades before. So I grab his hands tight and we both let loose, smiling and spinning late into the night.
The greater the attention, perhaps, the greater the memory.
I’m trying to take note of what my mother said without saying and my husband asked without asking by reminding all of us that we can have the time of our lives while trusting in the timing of our lives. How lucky we are that this world has peaches and oceans, ice cream and flowers, and days so long that we can’t help ourselves but dance with the people we love.
"The greater the attention, perhaps, the greater the memory.” Exactly.