Memories

When mom and dad came down last spring, they brought a whole bunch of my stuff with them. Mom had long wanted to get rid of it, and I would have just as soon gone through it up in Boston and thrown out at least half, which I did at some point a few months ago A lot of it I hadn't touched since it somehow ended up at my parents' house--class notes from college, postcards, some old photos, rail passes, old library cards (mostly from Geneva--the city library and various university libraries). When it got to the more nostalgic stuff, I couldn't bring myself to deal with it, so I just left it in what was the room I'd rented out. Well, since another renter's about to move in, I decided to tackle the rest. I still couldn't bring myself to toss the rail or bus passes or even the library cards. Among all that stuff, I found a note from Gina:

"A., Mme. ____ n'était pas là when I got there at 1150. Could you please arrosser ma plante?"

I don't remember the circumstances that connected those two sentences. In any case, the note made me smile--that really was how we communicated those days. Not just in paper/in person--the idea of e-mailing was absurd because you had to go to a university building across town to do it, and the computers were brutally slow (and most people you knew lived in the same building). It was the language--half English, half French was just the straightforward, intuitive way to talk. It was what came out. Anyway, I didn't throw out the note. Who knows what I'll think of it when I come across it again, maybe in another ten years?