My sister Alice and I love to talk about the past because our ideas of it are so far apart from one another, and so every conversation is like two people struggling through a language barrier. For example, in the matter of 1974, Alice had completely forgotten what a state I was in after my first divorce. I wore only one sweater all year, a mustard-yellow one with holes at the elbows. Janey was calling off and on to see if I was getting better and I would either refuse to take the call or grab the phone and fill up the line with questions she couldn’t really afford. I was obsessed with a song from the summer we met, and one lyric that went Glorious days, glamorous nights / And Claudine Clark singing “Party Lights.” I wanted to know who sang it and what station played it. I had a sharp memory of sitting in a car with my hand in her shirt and hearing it come on the radio. Janey had nothing to say and usually just hung up. Naturally, Alice had a completely different account of the year, and remembered mostly the big fire that took half of the warehouses west of town, killing six.
©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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