Memories

Dreamtime

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In one dream, a dream encountered once each month or so (last night!), a password to an email service or the passcode to the office desktop itself can not be remembered. His hands don’t work. Did they ever? Or interruptions prevent him from typing it in within a fifteen-second countdown, and the entire screen is taken up with 1-5, 1-4, 1-3 … .

He has been away from the office for so long—a decade—and he sees the voice mail light flashing on his phone, but he can not remember the four-digit access code. How many messages? he wonders.
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Thank You, Charlie B.

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Two years ago today, a friend of mine passed. Charles F. Brennan, III—my friend Charlie (November 2, 1960 ‒ April 7, 2014)—was my sponsor for a time.

His funeral mass card carried a quote from Emerson: “To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”

At the top is a copy of The Serenity Prayer in Irish, whoch we found in his apartment:

An Phaidir Suaimhneas
A Dhia,
deonaigh dom an suaimhneas
chun glacadh le rudaí
nach féidir liom a athrú,
misneach chun rudaí a athrú nuair is féidir,
agus gaois
chun an difríocht a aithint.

What follows was first published two years ago. Thank you for reading it:
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Long Ago and …

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

If the photo above is not of the actual car that my family owned in 1979, it is the same model Chevy Malibu station wagon that my memory has chosen to remember as the actual car that my parents drove to cart my sister and ten-year-old me around that summer and every other summer, before 1979 and after. (My memory is not what it used to be: It is better!)

Our family road trips over about two decades included vacations in Vermont (to see family) and weekends on Cape Cod, in Pennsylvania, along the Connecticut shore. We were not a wealthy family, so our family vacations were always road trips to a destination that we could reach in one day or less of driving. My father was the only driver, so this was more than fair. The long(ish) car ride was simultaneously unendurable and somehow, maybe sometimes, the only part of the trip that was worth remembering.
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