The Effect of Small Losses

[titusfabulous]

The loss of symbols of small memories sometimes overshadows the collection and husbanding of larger memories for me. Although I don’t conceive of having enough words for a mainstream essay on this—yet—one is trying to form, and I’m wondering if others have had the same experience of feeling the loss of some small symbol of their experiences that has had a greater “regret” and "frustration" pull on their lives than would seem needed.

I lost my high school ring at the bottom of a Virginia lake during my college years. I would have replaced it with my college ring within a couple of years anyway, but in the intervening years I lost memories by not touching the ring on my finger and having events during high school crop up. Now I’m feeling a similar loss by having lost so much weight from a long illness that I can’t wear my college ring (or my wedding ring) and, when I go to touch a ring on my finger to conjure up a small memory or two, nothing is there.

A photo of my dad taking Ernest Hemingway on an elk-hunting trip into the Rockies has conjured up enough questioning images in my mind for me to have written about it. I put that photo someplace. Each time I try to find it to analyze what it was conveying, it’s not there.

My dad sang in a Western quartet that cut a record ("Cool, Clear Water," et. al.), something I didn’t know until I’d come back to the states for his funeral and found my mother playing the record over and over again. I was given the record—a small symbol of how little I knew my father, a military man often off to war someplace other than where I was. Each time I go into a storage closet or the attic or sort through my record collection, I look for the record, to no avail.

My only souvenir of having gone to Ephesus, Turkey, was a bookmark I bought on the street of the Turkish port city of Kusadasi. I keep up to three books in current reading, and I’d come to use this bookmark for my principle read and to run my fingers over the ornately woven bookmark while I was reading to conjure up images and experiences of living in the Mediterranean. Somewhere in some hospital or rehab room over the last year, I lost that—and have (inordinately) felt the loss.

One oft-used locale in my Cyprus stories is the Tree of Idleness restaurant in the town square of Bellapais, Turkish Cyprus, on the mountainside above Kyrenia. It was here that the novelist Lawrence Durrell rented a villa and wrote part of his Alexandria Quartet, a villa I also rented for a couple of years and where my novel writing began. I don’t collect or much wear baseball caps, but the owner of the Tree of Idleness gave me a baseball cap advertising his restaurant. On a trip to Savannah, Georgia, I lost that hat somewhere near the riverfront. I’ve been back to Savannah twice since then and found myself going to the area where I thought I’d lost the cap and looking for it—even when knowing it wouldn’t be there.

Despite living a “lots of everything” life, I find myself constantly searching for small symbols of experiences that I’ve lost—and inordinately felt the loss.

At least I can write about them.

Anyone else find themselves constantly searching for lost small memories like this? Do you include them in your writing?

What a lovely post.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Now, you tell me?

It's never too late to get a fresh start.