I have small moments of memory that persist like character flaws, fragments of memory that run like three second movies taken from my early childhood. Standing outside a store in Toronto in rain, being carried at night on my father’s shoulders looking past the parking lot lights at a deep black night sky perhaps for the first time, getting a needle, a sun bear cub living in a cage on a low shelf in a department store at a mall in Sydney when I was in grade one or maybe even earlier when I was in Mississauga before we moved in 1970.
These memories are reflexive, of their own accord but there are not that many. They cycle. Some are of early dreams, one or two definitely from when I was in the crib. Right now, reading a shareholder’s declaration draft, the chill in the office and the sound of grey rain on the window snapped me back to 1966 or so when the world was all knees and hold my hands.