One of the glaring signals to me that I’m much older than I think I am is that I can no longer easily distinguish events from my past. I was going to write about something and I realized that I cannot remember if it happened five or ten years ago. The very fact that there is even the slightest chance of me thinking that a decade and a half-decade are not too different is frightening.

[Update: My grandmother died on May 4, 2007. Her death was the direct result of the incompetence and negligence of Indigo Manor]

Long ago, it must be. I have a photograph. Preserve your memories. They’re all that’s left you.

Several years ago … it could have been five and it could have been ten … my father tranferred many hours of old 16mm video to VHS. Since most of them were without sound, he used (pirated! illegal!) songs that he thought would work well with the images. One of the tapes, I remember, even though I haven’t seen any of them in five (or ten) years, was of my grandparents doing what I can only describe as “frollicking” around a backyard playing with a baby that was, in fact, me. The song my dad chose to soundtrack that piece was Bookends from Simon & Garfunkel’s album of the same name. (The album featured Mrs. Robinson (From the Motion Picture “The Graduate“), always comically referenced thusly, and so the title track has been somewhat overshadowed by one of the best rock songs ever recorded. Regardless …) Whenever I hear Bookends – which is quite often as I haven’t gone more than a month or so without some Paul Simon in my car since I was about twenty (again, the dreaded “five or ten years ago” phenomenon!) – I think of that video.

My grandfather is long dead now, and his wife, Anna Sophia DiFolco Albanese, Nana Anna, Nana, is now living in the Horizon Assisted Living Facility in Daytona Beach, Florida and I most definitely do not talk to her enough. But I send her postcards (1350 South Nova Road, Room 212, Daytona Beach, FL 32114 if you want to send her a postcard!) and I talk to her every now and then.

I don’t know. I mentioned that I saw Vanilla Sky last week and I’ve been thinking about Fight Club and The Matrix and Bookends and She Came in through the Bathroom Window lately. It’s very strange that thing I used to call life. It’s nothing like what I thought it was (five or ten years).