Beautiful Day

The strange thing about memory is its selectivity. How you can lose days and weeks and months of your life, not remembering anything particularly at all about them, moving forward with a clean slate, erased periodically only by the act of time passing. What you did on any of those given days dissolves somewhere into the back of your brain, the neurons disconnecting fully and swinging into oblivion on a pendulum of forgotten banality.

And then there are memories as vivid as if they are unfolding right now in our laps as we sit and remember them. The sloshing of Malibu Bay Breezes, inching to the tops of Styrofoam containers resting between your legs as you speed away from Krug’s with your friends. The way you step heavily and uncertainly wearing your first pair of glasses, dazed by the sudden difference in your depth perception. The shape of a single bolt of lightning appearing as you helplessly peer at the intersection it will touch.

Memories can be so powerful.

Like the day I rode my Mongoose down to the library with a couple of my friends to watch a time capsule lowered into the ground. I don’t remember the date. I don’t remember what was in the time capsule. I don’t remember on what distant date into the future it was to be opened. What I remember is that it was a beautiful day. One of those beautiful days in the not-so-distant past when kids were able to ride their bikes around on their own, before play dates, when sunscreen was a beach novelty and summer was a decent stretch of independence.

There was a small crowd of mostly adults gathered, a few speeches made, and a couple of stragglers – us kids – curious to see the time capsule as it was buried. What would the day be like when it was reopened?

A beautiful day.

Although, like I said, I have no memory of when that day would – or will – be, I DO know that the memory of it I have, myself, opened countless times, revisiting that combination of curiosity, anticipation, and excitement reserved for the big moments.

The big moments, like childbirth.

When the nurse wheeled me back to my empty room after I delivered my older son, the television was singing above my head. I had been given a lot of magnesium sulfate, so it was difficult to focus – a little like it was wearing that first pair of glasses – but I was joyous. Even awestruck. And felt that combination of curiosity, anticipation, and excitement at living this big moment. On the television was the video for U2’s Beautiful Day. And it was just that. A beautiful day. A time capsule in my own life, so that whenever I am blessed to hear that song now, so many years later – and after so much heartache, so much loss, and so many not-so-beautiful days – the day I find myself in becomes beautiful.

A beautiful day. This day. One in which I am humbled by the memories I am lucky enough to remember.