Useless Information

Some information is useless, and it is best to forget it. The tiny, pursed shape of my mother's mouth in death. I can't do anything with that image. It isn't a puzzle piece, or a lesson. Remembering that my Aunt Ada cut out the fluffy heart of her watermelon wedge and put it on my plate, her conspiratorial eyes shining in a bright smile, might induce me toward kindness today. But no one alive now knew her, the soiled white straps of her summer sandals, her uniform of straight skirts and tucked-in blouses, her necklace of glazed nut shells that taught me what the color brown meant. Hairpins everywhere! That was my childhood.
     I have separated everything into piles, and there is some matter here that cannot be recycled. I sought to draw memory into an outline, each entry tidily indented beneath the line above it—an inverted Christmas tree of ideas, my thesis of myself—shuffling away from the left-hand margin of the page.
     But the strongest impressions, pulling against the center like magnets, still lead nowhere. Lucid, canonical in detail, the sights and sounds of a lifetime—shorter than it seemed—refuse to lie down. 
     Best to put them out of mind.