Two Thoughts on Memory

The way we get to live forever is through the memories stored in the hearts and souls of those whose lives we touch. That's our soul print. It's our comfort, our emotional nourishment at the end of the day and the end of a life. How wonderful that they are called up at will and savored randomly. It seems to me we should spend our lives in a conscious state of creating these meaningful moments that live on. Memories matter.

--Leeza Gibbons, TV personality
(From the side of a Starbucks cup: The Way I See It #292)


"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between a man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn cutter might just as well not been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime..."

"...Grandfather's been dead for all these years, but if you lifted my skull, by God, in the convolutions of my brain you'd find the big ridges of his thumbprint..."

--Granger, from Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury