Reset Forty-Nine, Day Three Hundred Forty-Six

Another Sunday shed like an old snake's skin. I barely noticed it. Waking from naps I wandered through odd thoughts and random memories, and kept track of nothing. Memory's time has collapsed and everything happens at once, is everywhere and nowhere. I wander through a world filled with ghosts and the ghosts of events, and I don't believe in ghosts, so effectively I wander through an emptiness.

At one moment a moment came to mind, I was on a crowded streetcar, I must have been no more than four, and I was standing on a seat, facing back, between my mother and my sister while my older brother stood in the aisle of the crowded car. There was a lingering smell of cigar smoke from the depot we'd just left. An old man was standing a short way back, and made eye contact with me, and made a goofy surprised face as one does at kids. I had heard that Hitler (whoever he was) might be at large somewhere, and the thought crossed my mind that this man might be the missing Hitler.

I have a vague memory of turning to my mother and whispering "What does Hitler look like?" I was probably informed that he had a moustache. This old man didn't, though I believe he did sport a rather dashing fedora, so I concluded that he was probably not Hitler who, I had the impression, was quite a dangerous and unpleasant fellow, like the villains on the detective shows we listened to on the radio. I don't recall what happened after that, but the streetcar undoubtedly clanged and rocked its way to our destination and we got off and the rest of everyday life proceeded on its now forgotten way.

The odd thing that occurred to me as I dozed on my bed Sunday afternoon was that this moment, of all the many incidents of my childhood, is one of very few that have stuck with me for such a long time, and that my image of the crowded streetcar and the sound and smell of it and the look on that old man's face is so vivid amid the emptiness around it. And it occurred to me that, though my sister and I are still alive, everyone else who shared that moment is almost certainly dead. A streetcar full of ghosts periodically rolls though my memory on its way to... wherever. Oblivion, I suppose. I doubt that my sister recalls that moment, so once I'm gone so is it. There are likely a few other people who remember that old man, in other moments of his life, but I'm the only one who remembers that moment, when he raised his eyebrows and made a comical O-gape followed by a grin at a strange kid on a streetcar. Even the transit line was abandoned and the streetcar itself was scrapped more than half a century ago. Sic transit transit. Clang clang, you're dead.