"it's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards" 7/6/08

"it's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards" 7/6/08, originally uploaded by gary isaacs' photos.

i remember that when i was very young i would put my hands over my eyes when i didn’t want to be seen - i believed it made me invisible

Years later i recognized that when people acted in certain ways i imagined that they must be feeling the way i would be feeling if i were to act the way they were acting

The patton family lived behind the house i grew up in. One day I asked mrs. Patton why they named their dog Lucky given he only had three legs - she said they called him Lucky cause he was lucky to be alive.

Later the patton’s oldest sun died in a car wreck - Rumor was that they had to pick up pieces of him for a hundred yards. Not much later mr. Patton just sort of seemed to dissappear. he was a postman but even at my age i knew that delivering the mail had nothing to do with why he was gone. there’d been weeks of shouting and things breaking. In my neighborhood you could hear everything. i figured he was dropping too many things and mrs. Patton must of just got fed up and told him to leave. My parents didn’t seem to have an opinion on any of it.

Between the one thing and the other mrs. Patton wasn’t hanging as much laundry as she used to - truth is i thought she was kind of pretty in an older woman sort of way and i liked seeing her whenever i got the chance - but now it was mostly Lucky hoping around his backyard acting all territorial and grouchy as if he’d been blamed for recent events and it was up to him to put an end to the downhill slide - i got the feeling that i was on his list