So this morning, I'm talking with my girlfriend Alissa...
Which is something we do just about every morning. We were catching up on the past couple of days, and talking about our today. She was having a plumber over, to fix her kitchen sink.
Which is when something small, that's something really big actually happened.
My brain, like some oddball cotton candy machine, dredged the big churning plastic paddles (go with my here, it's a complex food metaphor) through the pink sugary goo that is my long-term memory.
There was a noise on her end of the call, a chip clip clacking together. It sounded kind of like a knock at the door. To which I quipped some joke about how "It's the plumber, he's here to fix the sink."
She said, "um, what?" And I couldn't quite honestly tell her why I said it. Maybe it was some game or joke I played as a kid? So I sat and concentrated on it real hard. And then I looked it up on Google.
And I found this:
It's a little cartoon short, made in 1971, from a children's program called The Electric Company. 1971 happens to also be the year something else was made: me. TEC was a sort of companion program, or maybe competition for Sesame Street. I absolutely loved it when I was a kid. (Especially because they had little short features with Spider-man, like this one.)
Anyhow, this short used to absolutely destroy me when I was little. I thought it was one of the funniest things I ever saw. Guess what? Still pretty darn funny.
Why am I so grateful for this? Because it's yet another profound insight about mindfulness. Forty-six years ago this little video came out on television, and I did, at a hospital. Then maybe five years later I saw it, and loved it. And then forty-one years after that, I'm loving it all over again.
I think it's a profound commentary on loss, and our own perspective. Things happen, they become a part of our life, our self, and then they get packed away, tamped down into our memory and our character by all the subsequent stuff that comes after.
Every so often one of these returning guest stars pops up and is front and center again. It's kind of amazing. We don't really lose anything, do we?