Exorcise One

I don't know why I remember...(I'm to start off a small piece with that particular sentence and the subject shouldn't be anything big, birth and deaths and such, only small things that, on reflection, I have no reason for remembering.)

Here's a few I worked on last night (I was quite surprised at how trivial they were, truly, why do I remember these things?)

-

I don’t know why I remember my Mom doing her hair in my Grandmother’s mirror. In the grand scheme of things it’s wholly unimportant and using up, quite frankly, valuable space in a brain that could use more pertinent information. It was one of the few times she was home, as a child, and she was getting ready for work, which, if I remember correctly, at that time, was the Back Door Lounge, a dingy bar a few blocks down the street. I had been in there once and the most remarkable, or memorable, aspect, for me, as a pre-teen, was the painting of a nude woman, hung over the pool table, blond and sporting a tuft of hair between her legs, a real blonde at that. It reminded me of the painting of the nude woman that sat above the black mans bed in ‘The Shining’. She’s sitting there, curling her hair, a cigarette burning in an ashtray and the smell of hairspray permeating the room. And not just hairspray but the Aquanet from before the hole in the ozone forced them to change the formula. Her hair is in a pseudo perm thing, curly around the sides and pulled taught on the top, hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t lived part of their lives in the seventies. It’s a short snippet of a memory, nothing anchoring it to anything. My Grandmothers mirror is an old antique, though I suspect it wasn’t, looking thing, a vanity adjacent to her bed. It’s ironic, really. My Grandmother, who is bed ridden, has the only vanity in the house, and, as such, gets to witness everyone else getting ready for their dates or pretty themselves up before work. A random thought, brushing around like the scent of cigarettes and hairspray.
•
I don’t know why I remember the sound of frogs outside my last apartment, before I moved in with my first partner. I’m lying in bed, it’s hot, and the window’s opened. Outside, in the dark, I can hear both the river running and the sound of frogs. I had never lived in a place where you could hear frogs. I remember it being a hard time for me. I had just begun dating and had put some faith in a man that turned out to be playing games. I was alone and, for that reason, the sound of frogs, many of them, the sound of a team, working toward some goal, comforted me.