Memory

Every year I have to remind myself that I have allergies. Or maybe it’s a single allergy, I don’t really know. All I know for certain is that every April my nose starts to itch, my throat gets a little scratchy, and my eyes water like a leaky kitchen faucet.

My wife tells me every year that I should see someone about it; a doctor, obviously, someone to poke me with pins until my skin blisters, and he says, “That’s it then. I’d stay away from pinecones, cat dander, and bad jokes. That last one was just a joke. Ha!”

Bad jokes aside I would take my wife up on her offer except that by the time my allergies becomes an issue they are already becoming a non issue. The season is over, for me, not long after it begins. My symptoms disappear like a drop of water on a hot stove.

Maybe they’re not allergies, I tell myself. Maybe I’m experiencing a kind of sympathy pain for the truly afflicted, the way a mother might do for a sick child. Except that I’m not like that. I don’t have that kind of symbiotic relationship with the world at large. What I do have, however, is a bad memory;  not like a sieve, as my mother used to say, but like an unstoppered drain, the old fashioned kind, with the rubber plug attached to a silver chain. Pull the plug and the water flows directly down the drain.

My memory is like that, never collecting like water in a sink, but spilling out of me through watery eyes and a runny nose.