the gift of life is a twist of fate

I am listening to my favourite Laurie Anderson album for the first time in a few years and contemplating the forgetting of ordinary things -- like an album I gradually stop listening to and then I almost forget it is there, and then suddenly I remember and listen to it and it is wonderful all over again, intensely familiar and at the same time new. Or food -- things I cook (or my spouse cooks) mostly, I do not forget restaurants and such, but there will be a dish that we have frequently for a while and then less and less often and then much later I say to spouse, "You should make that thing with the potatoes and tomatoes and cumin, it's so good," and we realise it has been long enough since he last made it that our children think they have never eaten it in their lives.

Or, as a friend said recently, if you have it and cannot find it, you might as well not have it. Which I bridled at in the moment because I felt it was a judgement on my lack of organisation -- I do not even remember the subject, it might have also been music -- but really, there is a point to that.

"Next time around you can be a small bug. Or would you like to be -- a fish?"

Goodness I love this album.