Memory unimpeded; and then, forgetting, for some, never, or ever
My memories don't fade. Tears in the rain; and then, forgetting: athazagoraphobia
About 5 minutes:
Athazagoraphobia: an intense, constant fear of being forgotten or forgetting someone or something. Memory serves those least who stare into the abyss of truthtelling.
Let me take five minutes to tell you who I am, as I have high expectations of you and am confident you will meet them:
As Seder and the Last Supper near, I think about our memories. My unique one is that my forgetting is not so long, but rarely, especially since never forgetting we are one is the only guarantee of survival. I have not found any better learning in any Book, including the vaunted elements of kindness and empathy lacking in too many of our leaders. I know that my brothers worship life, and their captors worship death and embrace murder and rape as tactics of statesmanship, so words are fillers of time, and that is all they are when students scream about freedom, genocide, and rivers.
So, I care what you have to say, and I will remember it when the next pogrom, or Shoah, commenced.
Or, will commence.
When I knock on your door at night, I know who will open it in advance. I will find you before you see me, or find me because I am easily forgettable without my gigantic yellow fur walking helper. I like being invisible.
You may have many reasons to forget me, but I will not forget you because my memory of what you did and said is more than lingering. One can forgive while still pursuing a just outcome. One cannot forget unremitting rusty auburn kindness.
My forgetting takes longer than forever—good French fries are something we never lose track of or ruin with that red stuff.
Still, there are things I still cannot remember; that is, only five things, and Oliver told me decades ago that there was plenty of extra room, I remember, and that it might last unless I got hit by a train or plane.
So, I try not to fly. Flying tomorrow will be painful. Life goes on.
Studying in Jerusalem in the summer of 1973, I met Yair at a Shabbat dinner at “Shoshanna's” house on Ibn Shaprout. Yair offered to commandeer a helicopter to give me an air tour of his whole country, his world. Over the Golan, someone started shooting at us while we were hovering over an old Roman Castle, I think, and we went down and landed hard. Two days later, I woke up in the hospital with a headache and only gray images of the previous days. Since then, I once flew in a helicopter at night, the closest I know to a waking nightmare, always anticipating that we would crash, but we did not; one crash was the cure, and Yair survived it, too. That is a condensed version.
I do not remember where I was on October 6, 1973, or anything about my reality that day, but I knew Yair was in the Golan and that he survived that, too. Returning to the homeland in 1975 helped me bury a few memories and birth new ones.
In the summer of 1976, I was housesitting Professor Wagner’s house in upstate New York, working on editing the Alumni Review. My friend Chip and I walked out of Burke Library, and the Dean of Students impeded our walk and told me a freshman friend named Adam Gordon had died in a freak boating accident, having fallen into the water with an electric tool. I know I fell to the ground, but that is all for that day. Adam liked poetry. I do, too. Do you think I cannot access his poems?
April 12, 1986, is gone too. My friend David told me that I tried to escape from the neurosurgery wing of Mount Sinai Hospital to avoid the excision of my lemon-sized brain tumor the next day. David claimed to have talked me out of it, but I am skeptical despite the 10” scar whose thick pink keloid tip still snakes out of my buzzed hair in the back left quadrant of my vast head, my deaf left ear, and the slight asymmetrical face I shave every morning.
So. Five days are missing from my reliable narrative—just five.
Life goes on.
I well remember (because life went on) these five days:
The days that two of my sons were born, cursed by the circumference of my head. One, the able doctor pulled out using large-caliber forceps. He yelled loudly, my son, that is, not the doctor, and has continued to do so, though now silent awhile. Le cadet, the youngest one, came in peace, and, like his grandfather, he is the kindest soul I know, though, too, now silent awhile—one Khamsin, the other a halcyon still.
On 9/11, the second plane sped by my eyes, level with my eyes over the Hudson, as I stood in my employer's east-facing office window overlooking the river and Manhattan. Then I watched it pierce the Tower like a bullet into butter and briefly thought orange could never be my best color ever again. Then, I recall borrowing my colleague's son’s USMC binoculars to watch the rest of that nightmare, which plays on a continuous loop.
Meeting my oldest son at age 23. My first glimpse of him was walking away from me in jeans because he walked north when I told him south of Bleecker; I saw my midfielder's body, thinner up top, heavily muscled below the waist from forty-mile hikes with packs; he pivoted, smiled, and I saw that God had planted his gorgeous Syrian mother's Damascene face on my body only with brown eyes, the only chestnuts in a sea of green eyes, exactly like my father's, but missing the Odessa ginger hair double gene. Now, I see the pain on a man's sleepless but fearless face, having stepped into the shoes he was raised, maybe bred, to fill, to chase down the people who hate us before we were born.
Coffee with Miryam for the first time, lungs starved for oxygen, when she walked into the coffee shop, backlit sun on her lush rust auburn head, and knowing, with near, and now doubtless certainty, when she walked through the glass doors, she had no idea who I was, except for the eighty pounds of yellow fur attached to my wrist which gave it away. Then, a few hours later, her river streaming, she kissed me goodbye on a street corner, and I was confident she might remember that part of my face. The river still streams, and I do not want to find the beach near the ocean it empties into.
Balance. Five days gone, the other five, never. Way too much unforgotten unimpeded. Most people get to flush the old to make room for the new. I just add new rooms to the rambling McMansion, which is my memory. I have not come near to running out of acreage, but infrequently, I get a little lost in the upper floors.
I hope none of the 24 still-held living hostages have my adamantine memory and that they each get to flush theirs or they learn how to forget or layer over the bricks.
Or, maybe they will get to dance again. It might be enough.
I know if I think about something long and hard, good things can happen, and even with two nasty knocks on the head, I remember almost everything I hear and still too much of what I see, just as Oliver predicted, because I am more of a librarian than a bricklayer, he said.
Unremitting optimists love and root for the hostages, the living and dead, who are now the currency of desperate men; these hostages are God's underdogs. I'm just having heart surgery and need a great set of hands, but no prayers from the disingenuous pulpits of perfection.
While I decline to pray because He seems as tone-deaf as I am, I insist that He remember their faces. Once redeemed and recovered, I hope they resume their shooting stars' path or dance again, like my tears in the rain, because life will go on.
And I will wake up to my rusty, auburn professor of kindness with a bigger heart.
©Philippe du Col, 2025
Shabbat Shalom!
©Philippe du Col, 2025
Shabbat Shalom!