"The Restitution of Memory"

Please copy and pass this to a friend.

I am old now, and my memory is that of the old. Words fade, people fade, days fade, but things that were long ago burn bright. I am invisible as I walk, too old to be noticed, but I do not fail to see. We are the greatest country in the world. Barefoot children chase delivery wagons, the shit from horses everywhere I walk. Groups of kids gather to push wagons up ramps that were built for engines, not horses. Our houses are airtight cubes, and in summer we sleep outside when we can. I stay away from cities. Tall buildings filled with the poorest people, admiring our greatness, flags everywhere, feet on endless stairs, the nights filled with remonstrative singing. Someone like me cannot make it long there, living by candle, by the day. I hear from talk that the races are separating again, that insoluble diseases take children in the night, that demons possess strangers and must be expelled.

I am old now, but my grandparents were much older and healthier. Those were the days when we had doctors and medicine and x-ray machines. This world will not keep me long. Bloody coughing fits tell me that. I write on paper so that it will not be forgotten. Everything else was forgotten already. All the writing and history and pictures, every memory my parents uploaded now gone, wiped away into nothing. Everything that had augmented or replaced human memory is gone. We live newly born, in a sense, unable to tell truth from lie. This is the greatest country in the world. Flags fly on every street. Thank God I am invisible.

I remember doctors and television and streets filled with cars and trucks. I remember bright lights everywhere at night. I remember the ball dropping at New Years and singing. I remember cop shows and honor and schools. I remember recorded music. All of these things come back to me with the help of small reminders. Suddenly from nowhere I see a freight train rolling through my small town, roads blocked, and bells and lights. They couldn't keep kids off the tracks in those days, and they threatened to shoot us with salt guns if they caught us. They never did.

These memories make more sense than what we have today. Singing and flags and strength make no sense to me. The lights don't work, we have no hot water, no medicine. Purpose replaces all these days, bringing greatness. Or so they say. I remember what I remember, and they can repeat over and over that our greatness exceeds all our past accomplishments, but that does not make it so. I hear there are assassins in every shadow. Rumors and news are inseparable, both spread by candlelight and whisper.

I rode in the back of a wagon with a small party of ragged pilgrims. Maybe they spoke amongst themselves – I don't recall. I had only one thing on my mind. Rumornews came to us that the people who claimed to be the government were going to tear down the old museum of aircraft. These was a non-event. They regularly displayed examples of the waste and fraud from before the war. They said "this was your money stolen" and tore apart old places or burned them. It always made me sad, because I had visited some of these places as a kid, when families had cars and there might be breaks from school. This set me apart – no one else cared anyway or believed their words anyway. But this, the museum of the air, this was different. I had to go.

Four days I spent in travel, sleeping in the open one night, and in lodges among friendly strangers for the rest. Finally our rig reached the overgrown wide space separated from tilling fields by the pitted asphalt of an old highway. At the center stood a steel and glass mammoth from which a tower protruded skyward. The crowd had not yet begun to gather. Wheels creaked as we approached in silence, over long cracks in concrete where grass was chewed down by horses and goats. To my poor eyes it it became clear that patches of wood had been affixed randomly across the face of the building. The driver took us near to what might have been a main entrance once, but as we clambered down – avoiding the new shits his nag had just dropped – the extent of its decay became clear. Crumbled concrete steps – nearly impassable – led to broken steel doors that hung open at the foot of the wall. We stepped carefully past them into a long dark corridor. Overhead strange shapes loomed. I could not help my emotion at the sight of wings and a fuselage overhead in the dark – suspended impossibly high above us. We walked beneath the curious sight and soon entered onto a long platform. We appeared to be at the center of a cavernous space that was open to the day far away to either side.