HSP

Someone wise said memory is a function of forgetting, not of remembering (see the end of this post). Francie Nolan disagrees. When she reads a headline which simply says , "WAR", in her office, at her job as a reader/clipper, on April 6, 1917 announcing that was has broken out she decides that if she pays close attention she had hold on to the moment as a living thing and not something called a memory.

Francie imagines herself fifty years later telling her grandchildren abut this day. She hopes it will still be fresh and not the kind of stale reminiscence her grandmother shares. She feels the groove of her desk where her pencils rest, the shape of her pencils - one of which she shaves down to its next dot, the feel of her stockings, notices the diamond shape design on them, hears the sound of her desk closing, the clicking sound her purse made when she opened it, takes in the smell of its leather, studies the dates on the coins in her change purse, the ridges on her nail file, the way her comb is inflexible, the threads of her handkerchief and every detail of her and the moment that surrounded her. She puts the headline, along with her fingerprints made with the still wet ink of the word war, a mark made with her lipstick, a lock of her hair, inside an envelope and then into her purse.

"On the outside she wrote - 'Frances Nolan, age 15 years and 4 months, April 6, 1917.' She thought, 'If I open this envelope fifty years from now I will be again as I am now and there will be no being old for me. There's a long long time yet before fifty years, millions of hours in time, but one hour has gone already since I sat here, one hour less to live, one hour gone away from all the hours of my life.'"

Then she says a prayer, asking G-d that she live - one way or another, that she "be something" every living moment of her life. She requests that she dreams whenever she sleeps so no moment of her life is ever lost.

Included in her time capsule is a poem Francie clipped from a paper, written by a fellow Brooklyn writer. Can you name the poem/poet?

"I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,

Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,

Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,

Stuffed with the stuff that is coarse, and stuffed with the stuff that is fine"

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Then she sees a headline on another paper, "WAR DECLARED," and weeps, even though (despite her co-workers' assumptions) she doesn't have a lover or brother in the army. Francie was 15. What a sensitive soul with a hard and beautiful life, lived and felt every minute.

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