Searching for memories.

 These days I am reading Total Memory Make-over by Marilu Henner. She is one of a small group of people who have total autobiographical memory meaning she remembers all her days backwards and to the present in vivid minute detail.  She includes exercises to help you increase your ability to remember and to reach back and recover details of your past days. I am loving it and feel right at home.  My personal recall is pretty good inately but years of working on personal story has honed my memories and also taught me to make note of things as they happen.

That's what I was doing one day last week - sitting in the sun at Starbucks thinking about Venice and making notes on my memories of being there with Jim. Precious time. Lovely to walk across San Marco Plaza again, looking ahead to the lagoon where the mid-day sun is dancing on the water.

Yesterday I bought this tea pot at a thrift shop in near-by Kensington. I first saw it there several weeks again and resisted buying it. 

But I kept thinking about it. Why? I have a lovely tea pot my friend Bernadette Nason gave Jim and me. I love it. I do not need another tea pot.

When I went back to the shop the tea pot was no longer on the large table in the front room. I thought it had been sold. "Oh, well" I thought. Then I saw it on a shelf in a back room. It was waiting for me and this time I bought it.

Now I know why I did not forget it.

My memory has been pricked. My grandmother had one like it. Color and shape. As I examine and look carefully I am back in her breakfast room. The tea pot is taking me somewhere I could not go without it. Its a portal to a new set of memories and I hope - more stories.

Marilu Henner's book encourages me that those hidden memories are waiting just below the surface.