Memory Catchers

The Millbrea Fine Wine and Arts Festival is coming up.  It always gets scheduled for Labor Day Weekend.  I'm planning to go.

I've been going to this festival since 1978.  I love going to this festival.  It brings back memories that pull at my heart strings and remind me of how precious and fleeting life's special moments can be.

A few of years ago, after my business partner passed away back in August of 2008, I climbed in my car and headed for Millbrea.  I felt lost.  My then pillar of strength was gone.  I hadn't gone to the festival since my mother passed away in 2003 -- my first pillar of strength -- and on that day, a week after my partner left this world, I had to go.  Something there was calling me.

I arrived from Fog City to a fairly warm sunny day, found my parking spot, and walked toward the crowds that were milling up and down Broadway Avenue.  There, I was suddenly transported to another time when life seemed brighter.  I saw myself walking in costume with my girlfriends toward the performance stage area, anxiously anticipating the moment in the schedule when we would be announced as the Winds of Araby to curious bystanders eager to see how belly dance was done.  And did we wow the crowds with our dances those years.  I found I was smiling to myself.

I then flew to a time when I walked down the street and laughed and joked with my sister, Mary, about all the little strange artsy things that were for sale.  Mary and I had a language that only we knew how to understand.  It was our special language.  It's that way between sisters as close as I thought we were.

More thoughts and memories began to flood my mind.  Time took on a personality of its own.  Empty engraved stem glasses perched on a counter top caught my attention, and there was another memory.  A roll of tickets and a sign next to it shot up another memory.  A set of tables and chairs next to the counter -- another memory.  I was inside a memory vortex. 

When I had gone to these festivals years back, a dollar filled up a glass -- for which I had also paid a dollar -- with the wine that was being advertised on that counter.  But Mary and I would buy the counter deal -- six tickets for a five spot.  We would laugh and fill our glasses with wine and stagger our way through the crowds, laughing and joking.  I saw her face that day as clearly as if she were there.  I remember suddenly feeling a longing.  I missed her.

But the thing I remembered the most that day back in 2008 was the vision of my mother as she ambled in and out of those artists' booths.  A white haired old woman with deep wrinkles in her face, I would watch her as she picked up and scrutinized the simplest handmade items; and I wondered back then why she did that.  Eventually, she would collect at least three of these useless dust catcher decorations, pay for them; and, then later, seated at a table close to the wine booth at the end of the festival day over the last glass of wine, she would hand one to me and one to Mary.  The third, she would keep for herself.  "It's for the Christmas tree." she would say smiling.

As I remembered the details of this memory while walking down Broadway Avenue that 2008 festival day, my gaze dropped on an elderly woman who from the back may have been my mother until she turned around.  And from the vantage point, I imagined my mother scrutinizing some artsy item as she did when I was with her.  I smiled and felt a longing.  I missed her.

And then it dawned on me....

My mother wasn't buying some useless handmade artsy decoration dust catcher that would eventually take its place on a Christmas tree; she was buying a representation to a memory.  She was saving her joy of that moment with her two daughters and placing that joy inside the casings of, what I had thought then, a piece of junk but, what I realized that day, the shell to a beautiful day of togetherness.

At that moment back in 2008 when I had this revelation, I sat down, turned my back to the crowds and wept silently.  My mother had been giving me priceless tokens of a day of memories bundled up inside glasses of wine and warm smiles for years, and I hadn't even known it...until that day.

So, on that day, as I made my way back up the street and before heading to my car, I bought a useless handmade decoration.  But it wasn't just from anyone.  It came from the hands of the Senior Citizens home.  It was a tribute to my mother.

This hand made twirly plastic thing with beads and ribbon now hangs in the middle of my apartment as a reminder of that miraculous day where I learned that memories can be seen as precious and priceless decorations within one's life and that these little trinkets are a representation of that time and of a place. 

I have since hauled out many of these trinkets that my mother had bought on those excursions and that I had mindlessly stowed away.  These little dust catchers hold the soul to my mother's intentions for buying and giving them to me.   They bring joy and peace to my life during an otherwise cloudy day whenever I look upon them from time to time.  In each one of them I see my mother's warm smile and a day filled with fun and laughter with her and with my sister, Mary.

These are not just dust catchers; these are memory catchers.