Memory

My dad's first cousin once removed called and asked him: "Did you know that Henry has died?"

Strangely, my dad didn't; and he was the guy who would have known before anyone else - he is Henry.

(But then again, his first cousin once removed may have know what she was on about after all: her husband was Henry too and he had in fact died when she made that phone call; some 4 years earlier, to be precise). 



[a true story, i.e. as far as I can remember - I'm getting on too, you know...]

PS Memory scarcity may be as serious a problem as memory surplus. I've asked my dad (the living Henry) about his cousin once removed and I found out: she's not once removed, just a cousin; her family lost a comfy apartment when Nazis bloodily marched into Posen, Greater Poland (as the only family in the street, interestingly); they moved to a small village in General Government and the cousin's dad was a manager of a shop which used to belong to a Jewish family; he was later arrested by Gestapo (reason unknown) and murdered by them; the family returned to Posen and the cousin married ("she simply ran away with the man", another cousin related the story afterwards); the first husband died suffering from a nasty case of TB and died; she remarried; her second husband came from the eastern fringes of pre-war Poland (somewhere near Vilnius, apparently) and could spoke fluent Russian; at home, he had a very small room to himself, where - a rumour claims - he liked to drink on his own; at his funeral my dad learnt, with quite a shock, that Henry served in the Red Army - as an interpretor (my dad calmed down); their daughter got a job at a bank (name given) and ran a backwater branch which was doing very badly; within a couple of years she turned it around; which impressed impressed her bosses so much that they gave her a much bigger brunch to run, and so on; during the funeral my dad could see her bossy attitude, but, apparently, she wore it quite gracefully; anyway, in most recent conversation with my dad, the cousin complained of memory loss, but she still remembered Kornik, where she grew up (and nearly ended belly up, according to family legend, in a local pond into which her uncle, and my great uncle, jumped holding her, for the fun of it; the pond was extremely shallow, but joking aside, the uncle was drunk (which he often was); the same uncle, serving in the Polish volunteer army during one of the Greater Poland Uprisings, left his post, and his gun, and sneaked away from his post into the bed in which his newly-wed wife (and my favourite great aunt) was, no doubt, fantasising about him sneaking away...