Vivid, heartwarming memories

"All memory is fiction." That line, seen in writings by US author Robert Goolrick as well as by Jamaican poet and scholar Kwame Dawes, has stuck with me since I first heard it quoted by Dr Karen Carpenter a few weeks ago. Although, to be honest, everything Dr Carpenter says kinda get stuck with me still yah. Nah lie!

Now look, I'm not saying I have a crush on the nice UWI lecturer, sexologist and talk show host, you know. No, peeps! What I'm really saying is, well, maybe I would just seriously wonder what is wrong with a man, any man, who can sit in a class that lady's teaching without experience even a toops of crush ... ahm, sorry I think the word I'm seeking is admiration! Anyway, I digress.

That quote has really been stuck in my head and stuck in my craw. Yeah man, it's stuck in my head like a digital red, warning sign blinking ominously, as I contemplate doing research that may involve getting people to share their individual memories of personalities and events connected to a certain urban geographical space. And it's riveted in the recesses of my craw like food that has been long eaten but is resolutely resisting digestion, as I realise how members of my own family and I tend to give totally contradictory accounts of the same events that we experienced together. It happen to you, too, nuh true?

Well, that quote returned to me at a reunion last weekend, as I chilled with a lovely group of people who I met 45 years ago when we were all first-formers in high school. Yes, peeps I was thinking that the authors of the quote may be quite correct in that assertion because I kept staring at some of my former female classmates and saying to myself, 'bwoy I don't remember them being so attractive!'

Yeah man, if I did ever notice that some of them so hot I would have unleashed my deadly lyrical arsenal on them and swept them off their pretty little feet. And who to tell, maybe some of them were looking at me and thinking that they never realised how handsome and charming I was. Of course, all of them are more likely to only recall images of me as an untidy boy and an obnoxious troublemaker. But as far as I'm concerned that would be more fiction than memory. What you think? box-mi-back@hotmail.com