I often think of things as belonging to me. In a very real sense these things belong to everyone, really. As we form our memories and opinions about the events that shape our lives we reach out into our environment and try to pull in artifacts, objects to bind to our memories, to make them our own. I do it with music and movies mainly. Sometimes a book will mark spot on the timeline where something worth remembering happened, something not fully appreciated unless taken in the context of the moment. Like I can tell you, for instance, what song was playing when my sister told me she was pregnant with my nephew in 1988. I can pace my first trip through Europe against the pages of a Stephen King Novel.

As I said, these things belong to me. These are the things that help add texture to my remembered life. But sometimes it is a thing much bigger than me. Occasionally a situation will happen where the relevance and the significance escape the bounds of my limited hold and these memories of movies and books or songs become just elements of something else, a memory of someone else. In these cases, the all my artifacts become the domain of that person I remember. Like the smell of wet and dead grass in November belongs to my grandfather...I smelled it at his funeral. The sound of distant and whispering waterfalls belongs to my wife. And the movie "The Graduate" belongs to a girl who once made something rupture and stir within me. These things do not belong to me, they only prop up the memories that belong to someone else.

Perhaps this is too vague a concept to articulate...I was just thinking about it a few minutes ago and thought I would try.