Memories

My memory is really odd. I can recall major amounts of absolutely trivial information quickly. But huge swaths of my own life are completely beyond my recall, no matter how hard I try to remember them. Friends and family often think that I'm joking when they bring up other relatives or people I went to school with or worked with for years and I have no clue whom they are talking about or when they mention some pivotal moment in my life and I cannot recall what they are talking about. But it's no act. I genuinely don't know what they are talking about.

But two of my earliest memories, that stand out from all that fog, involve my Uncle Tid. The first, from around when I was three or four, is helping my mother and aunt prepare some sort of package of comfort foods and other treats for him when he was stationed in Vietnam. Actually, I think I really just bothered them while they put it together. The second was probably just a couple of years later. I was in the hospital at Christmas. I can't recall now why. But he brought me a gift of a Johnny West action figure, which was one of my favorite toys for a number of years.

Tid passed away this afternoon. But his family still has its memories of him, even me.