Florence: You are so welcome.

Alex

I ask these question because I really enjoyed reading you post, and want to know more.

I am curious about what you mean by character in the above paragraph? I understand religious and age, but character seems similar to a personal understanding of a particular human behavior you have experienced? Can you give an example of that behavior?

Rob: By “character” here I meant a constitutional lack of fear.

Alex

Anyway it must have been hard taking up biking, a fairly strenuous sport if you really get into it, after having been put on low/no activity for the time you were recovering. Nothing to do with the essence of what we are talking of but I’m curious what kind of bike you have? Did you get one of the new lightweight bikes that are so much of an improvement over the heavy things we used to have.

I remember a bike, my first one, that I got as a child. I’m realizing things about it I never really “knew” at the time. It was white with pink stripes. It was used but re-done so you wouldn’t know that or I never noticed it. My parents gave it to me, but I know now it was mainly my dad. I found out, oddly, how much he cared for me only after he was gone. Just as the bad memories are still there, I have also remembered some good ones about him and me. My mother, even though 30 years or so younger than him, wasn’t much fun mostly. It was my father who taught me how to ride, what side of the street—I still remember that first day while he watched my first venture on the street we lived on. I put things together in my mind, and have a better understanding of what “was.” Now, it makes me like that bike so much more than I did before, eventually it grew too small for me (really I grew too big for it) and I never got another one. But it being used, its funny—I have a good memory—I remember that it was through someone my father knew who fixed it up like new again—and so it makes sense that it was his idea to get it for me, which makes it/the memory more precious. I’m remembering things/times it was just him and me. He did that for me, he thought about it ahead of time, it wasn’t something he bought on a whim in a store. Memories can be good or bad. Or they can be an amalgam of that. Good, sweet memories of someone special, sad because they are gone.

Do you have someone close to you that you can share your thoughts with? Is there someone special in your life who cheers for you, encourages and reinforces you? If so—good for you, if not—see how far you’ve come anyway without it.

You came through a trying time of uncertainty to a new time in which you seem to flourish, you deserve recognition for that and so I applaud you for, as the saying goes, making lemonade from lemons.

I will look into that book you mentioned; I’ve always liked reading. It’s reminded me of how many books there are I want to read and fear I’ll run out of time before I get to all of them. But that’s silly, isn’t it? I mean, either way, if I read them or not—when I finally die I will be just as dead either way and if its true that we leave our body behind (Isn’t it curious—it is to me—that our brain is a physical thing—a presence that has weight and substance and size and shape that will die also with our body (it is my hope and I think it is so) yet our memories have no weight or substance—our memories are ours alone—I guess when we die those too will be gone but they won’t be lying in a grave or saved in an urn for they are invisible things—gossamer wings light as air—wouldn’t it be nice if our good thoughts somehow could take flight with us and leave the bad behind to moulder in the grave with our used-up brain or else, even better, to disappear like vapor—gone forever.). Isn’t it odd that much of what makes us who we are, in total opposition to our physical presence—is our mind which is made up of experiences, thoughts and hopes and dreams and memories are invisible things that only we know. Someone might know, for example, that you faced your surgeries when you did and there is physical evidence/changes of that—but the way it affected you, the things you thought about and feared and hoped for—memories of the pain and the anxiety and the fear are yours alone—no one will ever own them but you. If there were a marketplace (how silly, still the thought comes) for memories we could go browsing at a bookstore (one of my favorite richest things) and pick and choose memories we like, seeing a nice one at a price we could afford and buy it and take it home. It’s nothing we could take out of a bag to show our friends or families—look what I got at Macy’s today! Nothing they could say—oh, I like that, are there any left? No—our memories become ours as things occur for better or worse. So I guess you “added on” to your memory of your surgeries—you wrote an addendum—a nice addition to a not so good memory.

Life—in the end—is one big long memory. When we die its gone just as our bodies are. But there is no place to bury our memories—they vanish into “thin air.”