Memories I Never Lived

For the last few years, I have spent Martin Luther King Day at the State Capitol, usually with Rich or Travalon, attending a presentation to commemorate Dr. King. Yesterday, however, I was at a birthday party for OK Cap (whose actual birthday was at the end of December) with Travalon and Jilly Moose. We met for lunch at La Brioche, and I gave OK Cap a little stuffed narwhal, since I have always been into narwhals and lately everyone else seems to be too. The weather was sunny and pleasant, so afterwards Travalon and I went to the zoo to watch the animals that actually like winter, like the polar bears. The flamingos and giraffes were inside, but we could see them too. I was surprised that the lions were out in the cold, and that they were two males – wouldn’t they fight to the death? Something seems really wrong there…

In the evening, we went to Flix Brewhouse, the movie theater where you can get craft beer and dinner delivered to your seat, and we watched 1917. It was a really good movie about two young soldiers in World War I trying to get a message to another battalion on the far side of No Man’s Land. For some reason I always feel like I was there when watching movies about the Western Front, at least when they were in the trenches and out in No Man’s Land. A scene where they encounter a trap in the abandoned German trench didn’t feel familiar, but an eerie scene at night in a blazing village sure did. Where does this familiarity come from? It can’t be reincarnation, since if there really is such a thing, then I was definitely a female leopard in my previous life. I always wonder if somehow I can “remember” the memories of ancestors, and I’m quite sure some of my ancestors fought in the Great War. I also have a memory of being a girl on a spring morning in the South, somewhere on a plantation, and I am quite clearly a slave. When Travalon and I were traveling through northern Florida and into Alabama, I felt like that memory was getting so close I could touch it… and then we turned west, and it immediately subsided. And when I was in Siena, I could remember being there at seven years old, and inside the Town Hall I remembered walking along holding my father’s hand… and yet I had never been to Italy before going at the age of twenty-one. Can memories actually be encoded into DNA? Or is there some other explanation? Feel free to leave your own memories that are not from your immediate life in the comments section.

Famous Hat