vickilicious

After sailing this afternoon we had a great dinner at a restaurant near the marina. My father had soft shell crabs, and we were talking about the best method for cooking them, which involved dredging them in flour and sauteing. He mentioned that friends of his in Maryland pronounce dredge as “drudge,” and this cracked me up.

Lately I have been dredging up memories of people I haven’t thought about in years, and it feels a lot like drudging. It’s as if my experiences have crystallized under the surface, like viruses, and they come washing back over me when I drudge them back into solution. I once discussed this phenomenon with a friend of mine, who says he relives embarrassing and uncomfortable situations over and over too, vividly, and we agreed that you cringe with the sensation of wanting to crawl under your bed all over again.

Flashbacks, of necessity, transport you back to the mental state you were in while that experience occurred, and much like the space coyote in my all-time favorite episode of The Simpsons (”El viaje misterioso de nuestro Homer“), “This is just your memory. I can’t give you any new information.”

This is where drudging is a little different from just plain remembering. On hindsight, I can clearly see people’s ulterior motives and interests, I can understand what’s caused them to act the way they have. I can see myself, why I treated people the way I did, and sometimes what I was really feeling when I was in utter denial. In drudging, memory is creative and interpretive, but also tedious and frustrating. No amount of learning from my past will allow me to change the way things happened, nor who I’ve become as a consequence.

I know that just as my journey has been many-pronged and complicated, so has everyone else’s. We are all different people as we transform throughout time, but sometimes that’s not good enough. There are some people I see, and even though I’ve had many interactions with them over the years since then, I can’t shake the image of them relentlessly and viciously teasing a neighbor. Sometimes high school friends will add me on Facebook, and every time I see their profile picture, I remember the nastiest thing they ever said to me. It becomes intensely appealing to remove them from my life yet again.

I used to think that the people who drifted out of your life did so for a reason, that it was the universe settling into a natural order where you gravitate toward the people who are best for you and move away from the repellent ones. Then I started losing touch with people I genuinely adore, and I started to see that happenstance and logistics plays a much greater part than I’d like.

When faced with the occasion to see old friends and acquaintances (as I have this weekend), it can either be a fresh start to encounter them as adults, whom I barely know except in passing, or it could be straight-up drudging. Because I am feeling entirely too cynical for my own good, I am betting on the latter, but the universe has a funny way of surprising me when I really need it.

All I can say is I’m glad there’s plenty of alcohol involved.