Mkgnao!

At least, that's what Leopold Bloom's cat calls memory.

This is how memory works for me:

 I was just putting on a shirt. I like it, but I like a lot of my shirts and somehow I wear it rarely. It's soft, dark blue cotton, weathered looking, with raised stitching seemingly pale with wear. And there are stitches forming textured lines down the garment, the thread of which is hard to discern, even close up. Dark green? Tarnished gold? Dunno where I got it. But I'm enjoying it on this drippy day.

And as I buttoned it, I suddenly said aloud, "Chris Gallagher!"

A fellow student at Glendover. Our grade. Don't remember if he was in Ms. Allen's class for 5th, Bill.

I liked him. He had something of the relaxed "in the game, and out of it" vibe that Linus emits in the animated Charlie Brown cartoons. But without the theological know- it-all note . Or maybe actually he's a fusion of Linus and Pig Pen.

Immediately my mind jumps to a visit to his house. Just a glimpse of one corner of one room. A thought that ever and always pulls up this memory — of a photo by the young Jacques Henri Lartigue, "My Room: Collection of My Racing Cars, 1905."

And then my mind either stays on the Chris Gallagher trail, like a basset hound, snuffling at a birthday train trip to Frankfort. . . the bullet hole in the assasinated man's jacket. . . Chris's mother -- was she wearing the first muu-muu I'd ever seen? Or did she just make everything she wore look like a muu-muu. . .

Or veers off at the image above into one of six or seven tributaries

- What ancient lead toys feel like in your hands compared to steel, iron, and tin ones.

- The leaden soldiers marching across the sick boy's counterpane in A Child's Garden of Verses. 

- Victorian wall paper and what Oscar Wilde said when asked about American violence.

- Other Lartigue photos I love.

- Point of view in photography, how wide the angle is here and how Ralph Gibson says he doesn't like photos that are "about glass."

- Freeman Wilkerson's collection of HO cars and how different from these empty shells of lead.

- That one auction Will and I went to where the mud in the tent was two or three inches deep and the bikes were sold, but we bought Will wooden stilts and me a toy truck and a clarinet.

By then I've finished buttoning my shirt. Either a) one of these paths is ambled down 'til it branches yet more, or b) my choice of shoes resets my memory agitator and I begin afresh.

Oops, gotta click 'publish' and  go change the tablecloth in the dining room now. . . hey, that reminds me. . .