That last entry about playing baseball during the January thaw...didn't I write that one before? No, don't tell me. I prefer not to know. I didn't even look back through my JournalScape archives. It's embarrassing when you start to repeat yourself. A sign of age.

I must have turned to the January page in my memory scrapbook and the "thaw" clipping caught my eye. I don't now about your memory, but mine isn't like a computer hard drive with every event stored and equally accessible. What I have is a jumble of snapshots and stories, collected and preserved because they meant something to me, reinforced a belief perhaps, made an especially strong impression at the time. Or who knows why?

Do my collected memories accurately reflect my life or are they just episodes I've chosen in order to form a narrative I like? How reliable are they, after I've taken them out to look at year after year, and maybe unconscously edited them at every viewing? At the very least, those aspects of a story that are of most interest will tend to remain while those that are overlooked are bound to fade.

And how do I get at all the stuff I didn't bother to paste into my scrapbook? Things I didn't consider important forty years ago might well interest me more today than what I did commit to memory. They might reveal an entirely different narrative, if only I could remember.

I need to find some way to get at everything I've forgotten. At least if I insist on waxing nostalgic. I've written about this before also, haven't I?