Other People's Memories That I'll Never Know

There are so many untold stories. A great loss.

All great stories or blogs are derived from the memories, creative abilities and imaginations of the writer. We are but a few souls on this planet of today and days gone by. In every person and in the now decayed memories of people who have passed are great stories. Unfortunately, most will never be known or shared due to the environment in which the human life plays out. Even within this new information age and in all the books, magazines and script ever written, the total accumulation of human experience has barely been touched upon. It is but one breath within a galaxy.

This idea came to me while visiting my mother in a two hundred year old converted monastery that is now an old age home. It is Gothic and very big. The twenty inch thick walls are constructed of large limestone blocks and the roof is a green oxidized copper.  It sits on top of a hill in Aylmer Quebec surrounded by drive through restaurants, gas stations and the replacement for our spiritual past, a new Wal-mart store. 

I was wandering the old hallways passing by the smaller rooms where the nuns used to sleep. I must have passed sixty doors. These little rooms had been the private space for hundreds of nuns who took a vow of silence when they joined the convent. How many great stories were locked up in those vessels for all those years is a great loss.

I came upon two large steel fire rated doors, they probably replaced the original robust white oak doors that I imagined had been there originally. Inside the floor was an antique aqua marine terrazzo, barely worn considering it's age. The  ceilings were thirty feet high and resembled an old basilica. The faded paint was flaking off and cobwebs were forming in every corner. The floor space was now divided by wall partitions that stopped at nine feet tall. In the center of the space there was an incredibly beautiful terrazzo Papal seal. Through the middle of it a partition was placed as though it wasn't even there. This bothered me as it seemed like such a desecration, not to God or the Pope, but to an incredible piece of art. Who made this? What was his technique? Where did he come from? What stories did he have to share? It is all gone.

In this once greatly adorned room thousands of people, all with their own stories that will never be known, came to worship and pray for a better world and salvation for their souls. Outside pigeons roost between the letters on the Wal-mart facade and the bird s**t dribbles down the blue Cadillac plastic.  People line up for Tim Bits, Big Macs and polyester shirts, again all with their own stories and no one to hear them.

One man standing in one place, one place standing on one hill, one hill standing in one city, one city standing  on one Earth and millions of stories never written, never heard, soon to be joined by millions more.

"An unexamined life is not worth living"  Socrates

Reviews

[Neva Flores Smith - Cha..]

This is profound and brilliant! I pointed at a cemetery the other day and asked a friend do you know who is buried there and they answered no, I replied a lot of indispensable people........

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=) Wal-Mart! (=