Personal deficiencies.

I have a selectively terrible memory. The only things I can consistently recall are texts - even learn by heart and retain for years. In school plays, I was the annoying bastard who memorized *everyone's* lines and died a little inside whenever anyone stumbled over them.

For everything non-literary, however, my memory not a tarpit but quicksand. I can't recall what year anything important happened: trips abroad, meeting people for the first time, deaths in the family. I can no longer recall how I met any of my childhood friends. Frankly, I've forgotten most of my childhood. This has been brought in especially sharp focus by a flurry of emails from my god-sister from Moscow, whom I last saw in 1995. She poured out recollections of youthful shenanigans, and all I could contribute were smileys and the occasional placeholder like 'boy, what were we thinking?'

In truth, I have no idea what we were thinking. If someone were to ask me to list five episodes from my entire history of knowing this person, whom I grew up with and played with daily from about 1985 until 1995, I couldn't do it. I can maybe give you three. And even those won't be episodes, but snapshots; at 24 frames per second, I doubt I could top 100 frames. A decade of friendship and four seconds of memories. What on earth is wrong with me?

My boy comments on this incessantly and with vigor. I can't recall restorants we've been to, the vacations we took, our early dates - nothing. An occasional image will percolate: there we are, me and him and my best friend, on a bus heading... somewhere... and I am holding a 5 gallon plastic jar full of lychee jelly candies. I know they came from Chinatown; I know this was our first time out "zu dritt," when it was still uncertain who was hooking up with whom; I know it was close to Halloween. That is all I know.

When people advise each other to live in the now, I don't think they quite understand what that entails. I'm thinking of ordering from CafePress a T-shirt that says "'Memento' was a documentary"; however, the odds are very slim that I'll still be able to explain to anyone what I meant by that a couple of months from buying it. (How's that for ironic? Eat your heart out, Alanis Morisette.)

So much for my murine memory. Now let's talk about gustation.

I had many upper respiratory infections as a child, and the Soviet method for dealing with them involved the quartz lamp. You sit into am armchair and stick into your nostril a sort of conical end of a tube that glows a bright pretty violet and irradiates your membranes with bactericidal UV rays. I can't be certain, but I think it was this treatment that dulled my sense of smell to the point where I need to have something practically under my nose to be able to say if it's a turd, a rose, or a bottle of anise liquor. And, as any gourmand or oenophile will tell you, without smell, there is no flavour. My boy is an excellent cook, and he doesn't quite understand that we experience food in entirely different ways. My lack of sensitivity towards his creations hurts him deeply. I am free with praise, of course, but as soon as he begins grilling me with regards to what *precisely* I tasted in that pomegranate-walnut chicken, I begin to flounder.

"Pomegranates?" I offer sheepishly. "Walnuts?"
"And what else?" he drawls half-threateningly.
"Ummm..."

I chew another piece. It's warm, chewy, stringy, soft, slightly sweet, and a bit crunchy - the walnuts, I suspect.

"You didn't like it at all, did you?"
"No, no - I loved it, honestly!"
"How can you say that when you can't tell me how it tastes?!"

And so on. Reruns every other evening. What sort of worlds do other people inhabit, I often wonder - strange worlds where memories and tastes linger?