Revisitations

Here is a real story that happened a couple weeks ago. My grandmother was trying to remember a recipe. Incidentally, her memory has been slipping away for a decade or so, set adrift by the slow and relentless advance of dementia. Sometimes she can’t recall close relatives, let alone how she baked cookies.Alas, she was looking for that recipe in particular. She used to make it all the time when we were kids but now can not recollect anything - no ingredients, no instructions, nothing. Which set my family into some digging duty; someone must have learned how to make those cookies.I tried, a few years ago. One afternoon I sat down with grandma and asked her to teach me her secret. She put together a colorful picture of how it was supposed to look like, but no real recipe. “Some” flour, she said. A “handful” of sugar. A little bit of milk. When I tried baking on my own, I realized that was not the correct recipe. She knew what they were supposed to taste like, but lost the map to get there. Last issue I talked of memory and maps and this little story, about trying to uncover a recipe lost in time, both stirred and completed those thoughts. X marks the spot. So what happens if the X is not in the unknown future, but in the past? When we lose our sense of direction, no compass to guide us, what is it that brings us back to our north?Many stories explored this idea before, of waking up and forgetting who you are, trying to piece together what happened. And sometimes they are not so explicit on this theme; think of detective stories where we know who committed the crime, but now have to trace back the why's and how's to make justice be served. And sometimes these stories are about mistakes. Characters making assumptions to fill in the blanks, believing in truths they created to themselves. So many good stories are built on a lie the character believes, on how they interpret the path to the X.As for the cookies, I gave my family what I had of that version of the recipe, and as an exercise they placed the ingredients in front of grandma and let her do her thing. And it worked, as it seems. I heard word that the baked cookies were good, yet maybe not the same as they once were. A different path, I suppose.-Maíra