“All sounds we ever heard… will endure forever.” – Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian inventor and pioneer of wireless communication (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1909)
And then I remember something that happened when I was a child and I realize it wasn’t me at all. I’m remembering a story someone told me once about their own childhood.
When I ask them about it, they don’t remember at all. Am I sure it was them? Maybe it was someone else.
So now I am the keeper of a memory, a piece of someone long forgotten and I can’t forget.
I dream the memory and, in the dream, it’s happening to me.
When I was a teen, I kept a diary of my daily life. I still have the volumes and they’re pretty boring. I wasn’t ready to bare my soul then, even though there was a lot to bare. I think I kept them as a way of rewriting my life, cleaning it up. If I didn’t write the bad stuff, it didn’t really happen.
I kept up these intermittent diary entries all through my teens. I thought I would hand them down to my children, that they’d offer some insight, maybe become precious family heirlooms. I thought I was doing something grand but I wasn’t. My kids have never shown the slightest interest in them.
Sometimes I think about what will become of my diaries after I’m dead and I fantasize about someone running into them at a Goodwill, picking them up for song, and finding something profound in them.
They can’t believe their luck. Such a remarkable find! They post about them online, maybe make a YouTube or TikTok video doing a readalong, and I become famous in death.
I know that this is a pipe dream. I know they’ll probably end up in a garbage bag with the rest of my stuff, add to a landfill somewhere and, hopefully, wind up lining nests or burrows.
Yes. I like that. If I can’t inspire the coming generations, I can, at least, keep them warm.
When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the story of the man who left nothing behind but a foot in a slipper. Supposedly, he died of Spontaneous Human Combustion while on the toilet. My father kept a book of supernatural occurrences in the bathroom and, each time I went in, I studied the picture of the old man’s slippered foot lying on the cold tiled floor. I wondered if there was anything left in the toilet – any sign of his final act of life – but the picture didn’t show the bowl.
I became obsessed with bizarre deaths. On the way to school, I fantasized that a piece of Skylab would hit me and leave nothing but a smoldering crater. I would be a headline item on the CBC. My mother would cry for the camera.
We had heard stories in the news at that time, my friends and I. Technology was falling to earth. You never knew when your number was up. Anything could happen. Satellites, airplanes.
A woman lept from a plane and her shoot didn’t open. She landed on someone’s front lawn and made a person shaped impression in the ground. She survived it and thought it was a miracle. She was on numerous talkshows.
I’m thinking about these things today because I was at the doctor’s and he asked me if I had ever thought about dying. Not suicide, I said. It would be an accident. Unforeseeable. Inevitable. Ball lightning through the telephone line. A runaway train. A slippered foot.
