Did you know that in the Yellow Pages the listings for Funerals is right after the listings for Florists? I didn’t either until I was looking for a florist for the wedding and the pages stuck together and there I was looking at an ad for simple cremations. The joys of duality. And now my neck, which was already sore from another day of hauling totes to their new home in the basement, is throbbing and my head hurts.

It’s not that you don’t expect to be caught off guard but that the nature of being caught off guard is exactly that. You are caught and there isn’t much you can do but deal. I get tired of dealing though because it is not like these moments come up in ordinary time. I don’t think about Will when I am getting breakfast for Katy or eating toast or making the beds or any number of things I do throughout the day. They come at moments when you are happy and moving farther away from them. The memories. Sometimes I wonder if they are just trying to remind you of their existence in much the same way that toddlers insist that their parents stay within sight at all times.

Not everything brings them back and often they are not painful. When Rob was picking out his tux for the wedding he asked for my opinion on every item from the style to the cufflinks and I could recall Will simply selecting everything while I browsed through a giant book of invitation selections. It was just a recollection triggered by the circumstances. Carried no real emotional weight though. Even today’s Yellow Page moment wasn’t fraught with heavy thoughts. It was more of an…aw shit, again? Because I want my moments now as moments now. Not connected to the past. And that is not possible. We are a sum of our moments

There is a song in Act II of the Sondheim musical Into the Woods where the Baker’s Wife is thinking about her “moment in the woods” and she sings,

Ah, if life were only moments

Even now and then a bad one

But if life were only moments

Then you’d never know you had one

And I guess that is it. Life is a continuum  of memories. The good, the bad and the merely annoying me when I would rather not be.