Day 22 - Ticket Stub

Ticket Stub 

Matthew Ryan Fischer

 

I remember being disappointed by “Throw Momma from the Train” the first time I saw it. I was young and had never seen “Strangers on a Train” and didn’t really understand the reference or the significance of the Hitchcock film. There was a scene where a character shows off his coin collection and they were of no financial value, but they were all coins his father had let him keep when they would go to special events. Basically the aging, grown man missed his father and held tight to his childhood memories. It’s a kind, sentimental scene full of nostalgia and grief and love. It doesn’t make the movie great, but it makes for a very nice three minute scene.

I think about that scene more now that I too am an aging, grown man. I miss my mother and I wonder about the things she kept and the things I am to remember her by. There are mementos and trinkets from a lifetime of things I will never know or have an answer to. Postcards from people I’ve never met. Notes scribbled on scraps of paper regarding events I wasn’t at. These things, that were hers, that represent some life I’ll never know, and mean something I’ll never understand. That or they were leftovers that got misplaced in a drawer one time and survived the years, only to be uncovered now without meaning or context.

I can’t remember the last movie I saw with my mother. I remember the last movie she wanted to see in theaters, the movie I wasn’t interested in, and found a way to be too busy to drive her too. I have a different ticket stub, to a different film, that we saw somewhere in the last several years of her life. But I’m all but certain it was not the final film we saw together. But I have this token, this memento I can hold on to. I can make it mean something if I want it to. And as more memory fades, and I am unable to remember the correct order of things, this ticket stub could represent anything I want it to. If I tried to forget or let my memory blur still more perhaps a dozen years from now I would remember it as being the last movie I took my mother to. Or perhaps I’d forget all about it and wonder why I had saved this strange ticket stub for so long.

I began writing notes in the middle of books from her bookshelf before I donated them to thrift stores. Messages for the new owner to wonder about. Thoughts and sayings and sentences that had nothing to do with the book itself. In one I wrote out a shopping list. In another, a strange sequence of numbers. What will they think? What story will the new owner tell themselves? These books, these messages with no meaning. Someone will assume there must have been one at one point. They might invent their own. Or maybe make strange assumptions about the previous book owner. They’ll assign something to it whether important or not, and then maybe they’ll remember it and wonder for years and years to come. And in that way I’ll be remembered. And in that way my mother will be remembered.

I don’t have a coin collection of leftovers from special events. My memories fade and a few photographs have to do more and more heavy lifting when it comes to telling the past. You could make up anything in between those photos, and perhaps anything did occur. I can tell myself that. I can have whatever memories I want. And I can always make more.