The other day, after Doug and I visited the Cathedral and Giralda in Sevilla, we were quietly wandering around El Centro, hot and a little tired. Left to my own thoughts, I began to contemplate how the nature of travel is that you go to other places to, of course, make memories, but after you leave, you`re bound to forget many of the details, and what does end up sticking is usually not what you thought it would be.
I thought about how I could likely easily lead you to the hostel in Zagreb that I left covered in the most painfully itchy bites from the bedbugs I`d slept with (while my friend Carmen suffered not a one) but I couldn`t tell you anything about the other sites to see in that city. I clearly remember the way my stomach turned when I walked into the former infirmary building at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp site outside of Berlin, when I saw what looked like an enormous bloodstain on the cement floor, and how I asked my boyfriend at the time if I could wear his sweatshirt because even though it was summer I was suddenly really cold. I remember how the meal I shared with my EAP friends in Koszeg was one of the best in my life, even though I was eating a powdery cheese gnocchi garnished with peas and carrots that didn´t really taste like anything. I`ll remember a conversation a Brtitish hippie was trying to have with me as I fell asleep in a hostel bunk bed one night, but for the life of me I can`t remember what city I was in or where we were staying. And sometimes all I can remember about a place is what it was called or where I stayed . . . a Super 8 in Tucscon, AZ, or a huge Holiday Inn outside Kansas City . . . but I could not tell you a single other thing about my experience of that place.
Thinking about how most of what I am doing on this trip, and every other trip, will be swiftly forgotten as my brain makes room for all the other less fantastic details of day to day life made me sad. I thought of all the street names I would forget in Sevilla, all the Portugese pleasantries I`d learned in Lisbon and Porto, and all the kinds of ice cream I had tasted . . . I thought of how many glasses of beer and wine we would savor and then not remember what they`d been called . . . and how even our lodgings, our train rides, all the things that we spend the very most time deciding about, will fall into a backdrop of other more pronounced memories that at this point we can`t even anticipate, though hopefully they will be good.
These ruminations reminded me of a somewhat more profound passage I really loved from Steve Toltz`s novel A FRACTION OF THE WHOLE. It`s the part near the beginning where Steve describes what the main character sees--a long list of strange things passing all around that you might never think about-- during his long period in a coma. I suddenly had the strong desire to reread that passage. A while later, we walked into El Corte Ingles so that I could try to find a book about Queen Isabella of Spain in English. They didn`t have any, but what did they happen to have on the top shelf? Two of the British versions of Steve`s book.
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