Mouse Memory

We had two or three of these kind of toys, friction powered, not wind-up, I think from one of our uncles, Mom's brothers. I think ours had black tails and, perhaps, black ears. Listings say that they are from Lehmann's, a company in West Germany. 'Vintage.' They were weird, spinning around and then shooting off in a random direction. Strangely robotic, soulless. Most of our toys had some sort of charcter suggested by their design; these didn't.

 

Memory of a Memory?

I don't know if it's the sudden turn in the weather or the incipient Halloween season, but today my thoughts have turned to an old black-and-white horror magazine we used to have. I don't remember its name; my impression is that we got it some time before any Famous Monsters of Filmland. And it was less 'fannish.' It seemed more devoted to cinema history and special effects, on a more 'adult' scale. I seem to recall stuff about Dracula, Frankenstein, and King Kong. The only thing I clearly remember is a frame very similar to this one from a Flip the Frog cartoon, Funny Face. The reason it stands out to me is because this was the first place I ever heard of Flip the Frog.

What particularly teases and torments me is that we have no physical relic of this magazine. Just lately I heard that people have no actual 'original memories', just memories of the last time we remembered something; that our brains desperately try to recreate circumstances and fill in likely blanks. So how much is 'real' about this magazine, and how much is brain farts? Though it sounds more likely to have belonged to John, my impression is that it was actually Mike's. That John has no memory of it seems to argue that that is right. Maybe Mike borrowed it from one of his friends, and that's why we have nothing of it but a memory. Or is this just more blank filling?

Morning Maudlin Maunderings

Lately Susan’s garage sales prep has been making for an odd mood, stirring up as it does old memories attached to the stuff from the old house which has been in storage for years. They are like memories made solid, often of ‘stuff’ you had forgotten, stirring up the ambience of a time. Not particularly stuff you care to keep, but redolent of things that once were from a time now gone.

I have plenty of ‘relics’ from Loop Drive, but they have several new ‘layers’ of experience on them. When I see stuff I haven’t seen for, say, fifteen years, I get a fresh steaming slice of nostalgia, not goods that have been going stale on the shelf.

But it’s time this morning to stride forward into how things are; to watch cartoons and pray the Litany and my Rosary, to bake chicken legs when everyone’s gone to run the sale, to check the mail. And so Time recedes ever dimmer and dimmer into the past, while the future unrolls before us into unguessed panoramas, clutching the battered souvenirs that we desperately hope will anchor us to our lives and our lost ones. But so it goes. It’s possible my new books will start coming in today; tomorrow almost for sure. Must keep the flag of Now flying. Here at 6 AM it’s time for old Popeye cartoons; so the past flows into the present.