Remembering is a Slippery Slope

Memories are tricky things.

One never knows what is going to set off a memory, or once the memory is in motion, where it will lead.

While I was consolidating three bags of frozen fruit into one resealable bag this morning, I thought of my mother consolidating multiple nearly-empty boxes of dry breakfast cereal to make one full box.

We never knew when opening a box of cereal if we were actually going to get Kellogges Rice Krispies or Mom’s Crunchy Munch Frosted Oh-lie O’s with marshmallows.

That boxed stayed on the shelf a long time.

Then I remembered how my mother did this with bags of chips, too. This lead me to think about other odd things she would do out of practicality, and although what my mother did might be odd, what my dad did was crazy.

He wasn’t practical. He was insane. Or so I thought.

When I was little, I remember him walking through downtown Evansville wearing a paper bag on his head for a hat and eating a fried brain sandwich because “how many times in your life do you get to eat a brain sandwich?”

Then I remembered saying these same words to my own kids. Not the eating a brain sandwich part but the taking of chances part.  And how, even though my kids may be nervous, they take chances that, as a kid, I was way to timid to take.

This made me think about how proud my folks would have been of my kids.

This made me cry. I miss my folks.

And then I mourned their absence in my kids’ lives, and how I wish my kids could have experienced the odd practicality and the adventurous insanity.