make a list of 43 memories

I studied in Berkeley one summer, and I stayed in a house with friends across from the law buildings at Cal. It was an old, Tudor-style house, with a huge great room, winding staircases, and a massive kitchen. In the dining room was a great bay window that overlooked the coffee shop across the street where we often played chess… My friend Angie and I would sit for hours in this window, in the sun, talking about everything. Angie died in a car accident that September after we returned to LA… my favorite memories of her are still those long afternoons in the bay window in Berkeley.

It was September, in Oxford. It had just rained on our way home from Bath, and the sunset against the clouds had mellowed into a soft, velvety purple across the entire sky. Several of my friends and I decided to climb out the stairwell window onto the roof of St. Michael’s Hall to enjoy the dreaming spires against the purple sky. It was so beautiful; Dave had a guitar (of course), and we sat on the roof for hours, watching the sky grow deeper and deeper purple until the black spires melted into it.

My 20th birthday, Oxford, October. After dinner at the Turf, we all decided to walk down the Thames path as far as we could in the moonlight. We wandered along the banks of the Isis in the dark, dimly lit by the moon, for hours. The moon on the river was so beautiful.

One of my best friends used to live out in the foothills, of which their property included several. One day we decided to drive the station wagon up the service road on one of these hills with a load of bricks in the back (mistake!). After much fun with a bottoming out car on a steep dirt road, we had a nice brick fire pit on top of the hill.

We had many great nights up on that hill… One night we went up in a dense fog. We built the fire, and we soon had a nice warm glow, illuminating a small space in the thick fog. We couldn’t see anything but each other and the wispy fog. It was so beautiful and haunting. We spent hours up there telling stories, huddled in blankets and scarves and hats.

Hiking off that hill that night was interesting…but we only left when we ran out of wood.

My junior year of high school I fell madly in love with a guy who was part of my group of friends in high school. No one else knew. He lived far enough away from me (went to a rural-ish high school where some of the kids lived a few hours up in the mountains from the school) for me to be horribly depressed about school being out for the summer (parents wouldn’t let me take the car very often, especially not to visit this particular boy in the mountains). A few times that summer he went to stay at one of our friend’s houses in the foothills, and I usually spent most weekends out there… so those were glorious bright spots in an otherwise heart-wrenching summer. The first of these days was the friend’s birthday party, which was a weekend spent playing games and laying on the grass looking at the stars (we were seriously, really good kids and that’s the kind of thing we did when we all spent entire weekends together). The particularly bright bit of this weekend was when we were all piled in the friend’s station wagon, driving out in the country, coming back from doing something “in town”. I was in the back with The Boy, and it was 101 degrees outside, and there was no air conditioning, and it was completely miserable, except that I remember thinking that everything was so right and bright and sunny in the world because I was with Him. I have a very clear picture of his shoulder-length, caramel colored hair and dark brown eyes that day…

So did I ever tell him I loved him? Yes. Did we “date”? Sure. Did it work out? No. But I still love this memory…

I was born in 1978 but I SWEAR that I remember the Iranian hostage crisis. (I also have interesting memories of the ‘84 presidential race… my dad explained to me that Reagan and Mondale were running in the presidential race, and whoever won would be president, and I promptly pictured Reagan in running shorts and a sweat band).

Anyway, that’s not what this entry is about, because we’re not talking about that kind of memory… My first memory of note was when I was three. I was topless in a wading pool in my friend Ben’s front yard. I still remember this with some (needless) embarrassment, because Ben and I are still great friends. I am so glad to have friends who have known me my entire life. It seems to become more important with every passing year.