Write about a mysterious or fantastical place in your memory. Like a visit somewhere as a child that, once you were an adult, seems far away and perhaps remembered slightly askew from reality. Or a structure or natural location that enchanted your imagination even as an adult.
I very much liked the idea of this week’s topic, but the execution was a struggle. I encouraged my memory to roam. It chose to take a nap instead. And when I let my imagination run wild, it ambled aimlessly. Then it joined my memory and the cats on the day bed and soon I heard the sounds of satisfied snoring.
When my memory awoke, it stretched and tossed me a bone: on our way to Trousers Lake during the summers when I was more interested in rowboats than boys, my family and my best friend’s family would stop at the mudflats to play hide and seek. The remembered topography seems like one conjured by my paleomammalian brain: picture an enormous, winding chasm, the walls on either side so high that a Tyrannosaurus rex roaming at the base would resemble an ant to anyone standing at the chasm’s edge.
Before I had time to digest any of the other memory-bones scattered nearby, my reptilian brain scuttled over and devoured them. Satiated, it circled several times, nose and tip of tail greeting one another after weeks of physical distancing, then settled into a deep and dreamless sleep.
Finally, my neomammalian brain, after hearing the Prime Minister of New Zealand declaring the Easter Bunny an essential worker, gently nudged me towards a fantastic childhood memory. The topography was anything but fantastical, however. In fact, so banal was it that I can barely remember any distinguishing features. It was merely another field somewhere on the outskirts of another Toronto suburb. What made the place so special was the human activity it hosted: an annual Easter egg hunt with my cousins. A memory cloud—one of those shape-shifting formations that might cause one child to shout, “Hey, Godzilla’s chasing Dad!” while another might exclaim, “Look, it’s Count Chocula!” and yet another might start weeping because the cloud reminds them of their beloved dog Toby who died the year before—passed over my three brains and I saw my cousins and I running amok, scattering rocks and dirt and branches in our wakes and whooping with delight whenever we discovered a foil-wrapped chocolate treat. And surreptitiously unwrapping one or two, or five or six, and devouring them despite, or maybe because of the directive issued by the parent politburo about holding off on sampling anything until we got back to our cousins’ house, where everyone’s findings were to be redistributed to ensure an equal share for all. We were too young and greedy for such chocolate-coated socialism.
Banality doesn’t only harbour evil—there are also great delights to be found, if one only searchers for them. (And now that I’m older and left-leaning, I would urge everyone to share those delights with others.)
