Remember When

Over the past weekend my husband and some friends moved my mother from her ghetto apartment to a nicer one in a much better area.  Like with any move, my mom decided to get rid of a lot of stuff.  I found a lot of items that I could not believe she actually kept over the years. There was a creepy looking fork and spoon from Spain that hung on the walls...those things gave me nightmares as a kid.  She had a cookie jar from England that was too small to hold cookies on the inside but the outside looked something like William Shakespeare.  Pointless and ugly, yet she has held on to it.  There were some brass carvings that looked like they were replicas of Renaissance work.  These things are so ugly and heavy that I have no idea what anyone would do with them.  If I collected random European stuff, these items would be awesome.  As it is, I do not.  I wonder how much they would go for on ebay.  Hmmm.

Anyway, among all the boxes of randomness I found several boxes of pictures.  I started going through them (after we were done moving boxes) and had fun teasing my mom about them.  Many of the pictures were pre-Lisa from their days in England and Sean's early years.  I pretended extreme jealousy at all the albums from when they took my brother to Disney Land in California, since I have never been to any of the Disney parks in my life.  In the group of pictures I also found a lot from my childhood.  It was fun to look back at them. 

Now I consider myself to have a pretty good memory.  I remember random details from a long time ago.  My friend Heidi once said I had the memory of an elephant.  I still remember color guard routines (most of it anyway) from my freshman year in high school. Ironically I can't remember my senior year show.  But looking through these pictures, I had NO memory of many of the events.  A few gave me a few flashes of recollection, but others, like breakfasts with Santa, Kings Island, first days of school, I don't remember at all.  It is a little frustrating to not be able to remember when I have the hard evidence that it happened right in front of me.

I guess in the grand scheme of things, not being able to remember Breakfast with Santa from 1984 isn't the most horrible thing in the world, but it still bugs me as my memory has rarely failed me with past events.  Maybe I AM getting old.