You Had to Be There...As Me

One of my favorite things to do is to share family or friend memories for comparison.  Part of this has to do with filling in missing gaps and part is to see how differently we interpret things.

When taking a course in college that dealt with Personal Non-fiction, my professor encouraged us to talk about what we didn't know about an experience.  This could be something as simple as "Mom picked me up forty-five minutes late and never told me why."  I once used it for the month between when I left my marriage and when I saw my now-ex-husband again by accident; I knew that in that time, he moved us to a new apartment and worked part-time as a substitute teacher, but had little else to go on.

This is especially fun when done with families.  For example, I can tell you vividly about the time that I broke my arm.  We had a summer lemonade stand and brought all supplies up in a stroller that my younger brother used.  When bored, I rolled back and forth in that (I was eight and much smaller than I currently am).  I lost control of the stroller and fell into a ditch, breaking my right arm very close to the growth plate.  I got a cast that couldn't be graffittied and came home with instructions to not get it wet, which meant I was going to miss some of the fun on our upcoming vacation.  When I got to my bedroom, I found that my sisters/co-vendors had found a birds' nest in the grounds and placed it on my nightstand.  I still have that nest, 27 years later.  I would love to know the story behind where they found it and whose idea it was to go looking for a present for me.

Based on other experiences, I'm guessing it was my younger sister.  I once got my head stuck in the neck of her sweatshirt and cracked my head on the edge of her dresser while pulling it off.  When Mom had made me lie down, my sister put every single one of her stuffed animals on the bed in case I needed to hug one.  I later brought her a rubber ball when she was stung by hornets.

On the other hand, my older sister is an artist and an organizer.  I can absolutely see her spotting the nest and giving my younger sister a leg up to reach it for her.  She would have also been the one to make sure it didn't have anything gross stuck to it.

My other preferred memory-sharing is with friends.  This is why, when people ask me about my trips, I try to have a travel companion around for the conversation.

Example in the spirit of Halloween:  I went to Dublin in 2012.  A writer friend who is paranormally sensitive had just gotten a refund for a sizable amount of money and as soon as I said that, if I had a traveling companion, I'd buy these plane tickets to Ireland, she jumped on board.  Of course, because I'm obsessed with thrillers and ghost stories and read her books primarily because they're about a girl solving murders with the involvement of the dead, we went on a Ghost Bus Tour.

Now, we are both agreed that we were bratty Americans.  We're both snarky people who like a bit of mischief.  So we sat in the front of the bus and corrected the guide's Romanian when he said that Dracula is a word meaning "devil."  When he said that Dracula is the second-best-selling book and asked what the first was, I batted my eyelashes and squeaked, "TWILIGHT!"  

He took us to St. Kevin's churchyard in Dublin late at night.  The guide told us all about the fire in the monastery where people had been celebrating Mass against English law.  He talked about paranormal experiences around the altar and naturally, people flooded that area so they could get a shiver.  We took pictures and he claimed no one ever saw orbs in pictures of the area.  (My friend proved him wrong immediately.)

Well, after getting a good ramble in, we headed towards the bus for the next stop.  I personally had not felt anything near the altar, but was unnerved by the fact that I felt as though someone were watching me from the far corner of the graveyard.  On our way back, before I had shared anything about this, my friend stopped, pointed at the corner and said "He's right there."  I kept walking immediately.

I didn't know until later that she had taken a picture before following me.  I just left as soon as someone else corroborated the unnerving experience.  Recently, she showed me the picture she took before leaving the graveyard, which she had lightened to the point where I could see all of the shapes.  There are gravestones and trees and walls.  But just near the tree is a shadowed figure in a place where no one had been standing.

One final example on a less dark note:  One of my best traveling companions is my roommate.  So far, we've been to Italy, Turkey, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Morocco as well as a few of the United States.  One of my favorite examples of this memory-sharing is from our first day in Istanbul.  To give some context, she is someone who LOVES having a set schedule and to-do list.  I enjoy knowing where we're going and when and when we have to go back, but I love the space in-between.  One city earlier, she had hit all of the sites she wanted to see in Izmir and headed straight for the bus stop.  I pointed out that the bus wouldn't be there for another twenty minutes.  She shrugged and said if I wanted to explore, I should be back there in 15 minutes.  I headed off in an arbitrary direction and immediately found a shoe store.  This is very typical of me and I bought a pair of Turkish slippers.  I also came back in 15 minutes.  When I suggested that I go to the Kulturpark, she agreed to meet me back at our cruise ship.  I had fun at the museum of antiquities even if she wasn't there.

In Istanbul, she laughed at me for my hobby of taking pictures of the familiar in the middle of the unfamiliar.  In this case, it was a Starbucks next to a Turkish cell phone store near the port.  After going to two mosques, she said she was ready to go back to the ship for dinner.  I said our dinner reservations weren't for another two hours and she again gave me permission to wander off.

That afternoon, I had noticed a lot of alleyways and staircases that led to unknown areas of the city.  I decided to hobble up one of these cobbled alleyways and look for adventure.  Most of what I found was a shopping district where they charged normal prices instead of tripling it for tourists.  It also had Turkish delight shops with a great variety of flavors.

When I got back to level ground, I found a text had come in on my phone.  Apparently, we weren't allowed to go back into the port by the way we'd left.  After asking for directions, she had found the re-entry point...across the street from my Starbucks.

This is a perfect example of how not knowing the whole story doesn't necessarily mean that I missed out on anything.  I know that it was thanks to my hobby that she didn't get lost on her way back to the ship and it was because of that Starbucks that neither did I.