The Story about the Deer

I start to tell the story about the deer emerging from the woods but I’ve forgotten where it goes.

See the story doesn’t belong to me but to my friend, a term I use in the loose contemporary sense. I haven’t spoken to him in two decades though I’ve watched his daughter grow up through an onslaught of online photos, every significant and insignificant moment of her life documented and disseminated to family and friends and colleagues and former grade school acquaintances. My friend’s faithful archiving renders obsolete our poor mortal memory. The long awaited democratization of everyday. The disruption coming at last to the once untouchable watercolors of nostalgia. But you have to admit she is adorable!

He told the story about the deer so long ago I’ve lost—as I’ve lost the names of places and the names of people and the without even trying the people, too—the whole point of it. I remember only that the kids smoking cigarettes behind the dumpsters outside Clear Creek Elementary were enraptured by it.

Just as these people appear to be now at this party where I’ve had several more glasses of wine than I had promised myself I would drink and have started a story that has abruptly stopped like a deer emerging from the woods.