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ovenbird
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When I was six or seven I woke late on Christmas_Eve and eased open my bedroom door to peer into the sparkle of the tree-lit living room. There I saw Santa_Claus, red suit and white beard and black boots, making his silent getaway. This cannot be a memory at all. It must have been a dream. But even now, it lives in my mind as memory. I’m SURE it was real when, in fact, there’s absolutely no possibility it played out that way. When I revisit the images they are as stark as they were decades ago. I can feel the dense quiet of that midnight hour. I can feel the solidity of the door beneath my hand. I can see the specific configuration of the room–the old plaid couch, the half wall dividing the living room from the dining room, the record player, the lamp with the brown shade, and there, in the middle of it all, Santa Claus, as real as anything else. I still can’t explain it. Dream? Hallucination? Fabricated memory patched together from myth and imaginings? My brain says, “Memory.” I say, “It can’t be.” My brain says, “It can.” So I carry this memory around in the vault of my mind, turning it over occasionally to wonder at its existence. It shouldn’t be there at all, but it persists where so many other memories have faded to nothing.
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251008
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