It's all about Paddington.

April 19, 2015

    It's funny how memory works.  A friend told me she watched the Paddington Bear movie on her flight.  With just one word, I was reliving my Kindergarten orientation experience vividly all at the mention of Paddington Bear.  (Do I dare mention that this memory is 32 years old?  Now you know my age if you do the math.)

   Mostly, it was a memory of my introduction to the school library.  I also remembered all the poking and prodding and the eye testing I had to go through in the gym to check us over as we passed through different booths set up with dividers.  I had to tell which way a shape like a capital "E" was facing in the eye test which resulted in a prescription for glasses to help my right eye.  I used to see double when I got tired and being a 5 year old, I didn't think much of it because that was my normal.  Thankfully I only needed them for around 6 months.

  I remembered the wonder of walking into that enormous room with all those books, all sorts of stories just waiting to be read.  I had never seen anything like it.  (At that point, the only books I knew were the ones my mom had bought me and those of the tiny church library.)  We were allowed to look around the room, the various books on the shelves and then Mrs. Thoman, the librarian read us a story about Paddington Bear and his marmalade.

   I remember the way her crooked fingers curled around the cover to hold the book out for us to see the pictures.  (Mostly likely due to arthritis, but I wouldn't have known that back then.  The only other person I had seen with fingers like that was my grandmother's friend Mrs. Hancock, the one who called me Minnie Mouse when I hid under the table as she and my grandma took tea.)  Mrs. Thoman's fingers seemed perfectly shaped to grip the book.  I figured her fingers were that way because she was old and had read so many books to so many children.  Hey, I was 5.

  Mrs.Thoman even had a stuffed Paddington Bear which once we started attending school we were all given a turn at library time to hold.  I remember how important I felt when it was my turn to hold the coveted stuffed toy.  

  The memory was like candy.  It made me happy as the disappointment and complexity of adulthood slipped away for a few minutes.  I remembered the excitement I felt at starting school.  It might be laughable now, but in my simple life then, school and the promise of what looked like thousands of stories waiting to be read was enough to awe my five year old self.  My world was expanding.  I was going to learn so many things, see so many new things.   Perhaps it was the emotion tied to the memory that I needed to remember: hope and joy about the future, anticipation that things are going to be great.  I have been running short on these lately.  It seems to be a more a rare commodity in adulthood.
Perhaps a person craves hope just the same as a body craves physical nutrients.  We need it.

  The way memories rise from the depths of subconsciousness with just one word or image is incredible.  The more the connections that can be made in a web of ideas, the easier it is to bring an idea of item to mind.  And then there are those little things that you don't even know you still remember that just bubble up surprisingly with the right trigger and make you smile.  Perhaps everything we experience is all still there resting somewhere in the subconscious.