Stolen Moments

In two years, I will have lived in Oakland as long as I lived in Boulder. Thirty years. Half my life in one place, half my life in another. It seems profound to me. A mile marker of some sort. Halfway.
Which is odd, since so many of my memories come from the front end. Even more interesting to me is that there is no way that I can remember all of those first year or two. Not really. I have something in there that I want to believe is watching the funeral of John F. Kennedy. In my parents' basement. It was dark. And scary.
A lot of those early memories are dark and scary. That may have something to do with the way they stack up in my head. Dark and scary tends to overwhelm monotony. Not in all facets. I am a big fan of ruts. But ruts don't tend to be very memorable after they've become ruts. In those early days, so many things were fresh and new that it was easy to impress a little whippersnapper like myself. First day at school? Check. First trip to Disneyland? Roger that. Well, sort of. There were plenty of first days of school, and more than one trip to Disneyland. Some of those oh-so-vivid rememberings are amalgams of patterns that overlapped and became family stories. Tales that were attached to photos or home movies and repeated endlessly at gatherings of the clan.
That kind of reverie doesn't exist as much for my life in California. That sort of stuff is the designated providence of my son's world. It is his life that unfolds during my Golden State chapters. So much of what I can't forget about the last three decades are my son's memories. His first day of school. His first trip to Disneyland. We have photos and video to seal that deal. The part where I got married after I moved out here is that piece that makes everything else spin in a California way. But of course, we did get married in that Rocky Mountain Way, so all that mile high energy put us on a path to lead us into making things that we can all remember in dreams.
So what will happen in the next chunk? Whose memories will we be generating then? Time will tell. Stories. Lots more stories.