Not long ago I visited the Rose Wagner Theater to see "The Central Park Five." I arrived early and parked in the east lot. It was almost empty and as I stood there in that vacancy I remembered the last time I had been there.
It was inauguration day, January 7th, and everything asphalt and proximate to the theatre was my responsibility. Including that lot. On that day I arrived in the early darkness, parked a block away, and walked toward the theater in a new suit. It was cold, and the frozen remains of a snow storm were stacked in dirty lumps along the theater's wall.
I stood on those icy lumps trying to tape "reserved" signs on the wall's pebbled surface. It was a frustrating exercise. My footing slipped away and the cold masonry refused to marry with the masking tape.
Now, one hundred and twenty days later, on a warm and balmy evening, I inspected that wall looking for some vestige of those signs. If nothing else, the temperature should have confirmed how much time had passed. But the weeks bridging back to that January date have been so full of the wonderful, the various, and the new, that the passage of one hundred and twenty days seemed improbable.
I walked over to the wall and inspected the surface well above my head, the very place I must have touched as I stood on a block of snow. But nothing; no paper, no tape, no faint mark of adhesive.
A part of me wanted to find some evidence to prove it happened, and not so long ago. Minus that, I wondered at the possibility of waking up, knowing not days had passed, but years had passed, and this memory was contained in a recollection separating sleep from being fully awake. The moment psychology reserves to remind us of a time that was perfect.
