My wife googled more efficiently than I had done a decade ago and found the answer to a personal mystery dating from 1973.
An artistic young woman named Christie Drake wandered into the set-design part of the theater department near the very end of my sophomore year. She had liked our band and developed a crush on one of our guitarists. (Jaye Urgo from Charlottesville. Just looked him up for the first time in 40+ years. The internet is a wonderful thing. Still playing music professionally, as I think everyone but me is from that band.) He had gone out to dinner with her family and noted, rather shaken, that they had said grace right out loud in the restaurant. The bandmembers predicted a quick end to this relationship.
(I should look her up as well, but...married names.."Christie" has a couple of spellings..."Drake" is not uncommon...we'll see.)
As I was in my first year of Tolkien fanatacism it is unsurprising that we talked about the fantasy genre. She told me about a writer who was a friend of Tolkien's who had a whole series of books in which Jesus took the form of a lion. Her family had read it aloud to her as a girl. (So, 1965 or so. Likely just about the only family in America doing this.) That didn't sound promising to me, but I wondered if my younger brother might have heard of him. I was going back to Sudbury in just a few weeks and would ask. 44 years of Lewis fanaticism later, I have to be grateful to the girl.
She also mentioned a game that was played by mail called Midgard, in which one could assume a character and go on adventures. She thought it was full, but a Midgard II was opening up. She didn't have any contact information. Only after playing D&D starting in the early 80's did I recognise that this must have been some early RPG.
I mentioned it five years ago, perhaps hoping that someone had heard something and could give me answers. No one did. Read that post before continuing.
My wife claims to read all my posts, but was genuinely surprised when I brought this up tonight. She thinks she had never heard this before. Of course, my wife has a type of memory that I believe is biologically impossible, yet there it is. She has an enormous vocabulary and a head full of facts on a thousand subjects, but these are only accessible if they are cued, rather like a card catalog. She not only is a librarian, she is a library. However, this is a library in which the history of the building itself has vanished. Like her father before her, events drop out altogether, or become attached (with great assurance) to unrelated stories. So perhaps she is lying about reading my posts, but more likely, she read it and was intrigued and excited at the time but got distracted by something else and it fell beneath the waves.
I was not encouraging to her that she would find anything, as I'd already had a try in 2012. Yet by inserting the search terms "by mail," a description of Midgard and its eventual relationship to D&D was found at the fifth entry. Those librarians. Clever like that.
3 comments:
I have never said that I read all your posts, just that I TRY to read them all.
I think you might enjoy this poem, "Forgetfulness," by Billy Collins.
OT, a friend turned me on to Lewis in about 1970. Life has never been the same.
On topic, it has been proved to me the hard way that I can now forget even fairly significant events, ones that I clearly must have been aware of when they happened. And this has been going on for more than 20 years, so it's not just age and probably not even incipient dementia. I can remember the first time in my life, in my early 20s, I think, when I became aware that it was no longer possible to remember essentially every event in my history. These days I think not that many events make it into long-term memory; they have to carry an unusual charge. Most things I remember long enough to get through the business of the week or the month, then they fade.
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