A Monday Memory

This week’s Monday Memory:

While driving back from the consultancy job I had today, I saw two dead kangaroos, and one dead rainbow lorikeet on the road. We often notice things while we’re travelling, either as a driver or a passenger that make an impression on us for some reason. What trip did you make, where you noticed something that made an impression that stuck with you? It doesn’t have to be something you saw, it could have been a sound you heard, or a particular scent.. what was your memory?

As a child (up until the second grade for me), we lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. This made trips down to my mom’s folks in Santa Barbara a four or five hour trip or so I’d guess. Since we couldn’t leave on a Friday until my dad got off work, the trip was usually in the dark, and my brother and eye usually crashed (sleeping-wise) before we arrived.

I remember driving through fields with tall eucalpytis trees as wind breaks.

I remember my dad cursing about the traffic in Gilroy, and saying something vehement to the effect that they ought to “get rid of this Gilroy mess,” or words to that effect, and somehow associating them with the driver up ahead, a man wearing a hat and who, for some reason, I was convinced looked like Jimmy Durante, and I wondered why such a known criminal as this Gilroy fellow was allowed go to free …

Hey, I was no older than eight. Give me a break.

But most of all I remember the moon. Thin slivers or big yellow harvest cheeses floating in the blackness over the countryside, or even, once, my first partial lunar eclipse, a blood red orb watching us as we traveled.

Neat stuff. Brings back memories.