I don’t know for certain if I remember the actual event, or if I think I remember the event because I’ve seen the pictures, and have heard the stories? Sometimes you see pictures and hear stories enough that it all begins to drift together and form what we perceive to be a memory. I don’t know if this is one of those times? I’m not sure it matters.

I suppose the only reason it might matter, to me anyway, is that if it is an actual memory, then it is my first actual memory, and if our lives are simply a composition of our experiences, and the memories of those experiences, then it is where the composition of my first chapter of life began to take shape, and where the composition of my Great-Grandfathers epilogue was nearing an end.

I do know that I was two-years old when my Great-Grandfather, Josef Gins, passed away in 1974. He was 81, born in Durningen, France, during the last decade of the 19th century. Actually, it was Durningen, Germany, when he was born. It is a small border village whose borders have shifted throughout the year’s dependent upon which country claimed victory in the latest war.

It always seemed odd to me that the location of a line on a map was all that was necessary to make him “officially” German at birth rather than “officially” French (like his parents). I have no qualms with either, but if we are to consider stereotypical proclivities and characterizations, I am more likely to knock over a glass of wine while reaching for a stein of beer than vice versa. I also look silly in a beret.

The memory in question, this first possible memory I have of this world, is of me sitting on my Great-Grandpa Josef’s lap, while he sat in his rocking chair and thumbed through a magazine. The very same rocking chair that was incinerated when our log cabin went up in flames a few years back. As David Bowie sang, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

As I was only 2 years old when this “memory” was formed, I am fairly sure that much of it has been filled in by a photograph, but I feel as though I remember seeing him lick his fingers before he turned each page of the magazine. Groundbreaking stuff (sarcasm).

Yes, my first memory, the spot in time where it seems that my tabula rasa was first scribbled upon, is of a small…slightly built…old man, licking his bony finger and turning the pages in magazine. An earth-shaking revelation (also sarcasm).

Perhaps, as two-year olds tend to explore the world with their mouths (filthy little creatures), I was simply impressed upon by the realization of another possible use for that slobbery hole in my face and grubby fingers at the end of my stubby, milky white arms? It’s as if I can hear the brain, encased in that big bobbling head atop that wee little body, say, “Well I’ll be…page turners…that’s what these things are for.”

At any rate, to this day, which is many days removed from that day on Great-Grandpa Gin’s lap, whenever I lick my fingers to turn a page, I think of him. Odd? Possibly. But to simply be “thought of”, in most any context after we are gone, seems to be more desirable than to not pass through anyone’s thoughts ever again.

Perhaps, when I am gone, memories of me will creep into my loved one’s thoughts, riding swiftly upon the thick, noxious odor of a pungently stout, yet silent, fart. As Terrance Mann said in the movie Field of Dreams, “The memories will be so thick, they’ll have to brush them away from their faces.”

Like the 3rd-cousin (twice removed) that you were guilted into including in your wedding, the usher of our memory into the minds of others may not be of our choosing. So it goes.