The Privilege of Forgetting

Its no secret to those who know and love me that I can be a very forgetful person. One of my favorite quotes about this comes from Marion Adams "If your friends with Marlene, than you must have a piece of her clothing in your house." LOL

Marion Adams

Ok so I admit that when am excited, when I'm in a rush, or when I'm just plain tired I tend to forget things, leave things at bus stops, walk away without getting my bank card from the ATM machine, leave my bag open on a bus and get jacked for all I'm worth etc...

I dont know why this is... I can point the finger at genetics, my mom can look for her keys for 40 minutes until she realizes they were in her pocket the whole time :p

my mom wearing a basket on her head :D

BUT also, I think it may have something to do with the fact that I never needed to take this issue too seriously in America. I know! I know not every American is like this, but with my personality and other factors in my life, it just so happened that when I lost something, somehow things always worked out in the end. As a result when I would lose something I just stopped worrying about it and just dealt with it, thinking "Ok so who do I need to call to fix this". I'm not trying to say its not inconvenient because IT WAS and STILL IS and don't prefer this route...but is it life or death....no....freak out worthy? Definitely not....could this have facilitated my personality defect?? Maybe.

What made me reflect about this was a memory my host mom shared with me over a glass (or two) of gin de casa (wine) about her upbringing during the Soviet Union era here in Moldova.

Quick history about Moldova: In 1946, as a result of a severe drought and excessive delivery quota obligations and requisitions imposed by the Soviet government, the southwestern part of the USSR suffered from a major famine resulting in 216,000 deaths and about 350,000 cases of dystrophy in the Moldavian SSR alone.

She told me that in order to survive the communist death grip on food her father would hide food in their "wine barrels" she claims that if he had not done this, they surely would have died of starvation like many of their neighbors did.

"In those days you could walk up and down the streets and see bodies piled up on top of each other just laying on the sides of the street" she said with glazed eyes, she continued " just to get a piece of bread you needed to show your documents and bring your food record with you to be controlled and stamped. If you lost that small book you starved..."

This sparked my own memories of my occasional frustration over dealing with Moldovan paperwork, why did everything have to be stamped and checked over and over! Why couldn't I just get money from the bank without my debit card if I had a passport!

The legacy of the Soviet Union will be one that will take years to forget, just recently I came to peace with that, BUT it is happening!

Yet, more than anything it made me think about my forgetfulness, and how privileged I am to be able to forget. I had never thought of this flaw as a privilege, but the fact that I can rest assure that no matter what happens to my stuff or documents my basic needs will always be taken care of by someone somewhere is a privilege. There will be a system, an infrastructure of people and institutions in place that will take care of me if something should happen, hence I don't worry so much, thats not historically normal.

I am grateful that no matter what I have been through I never had to face war, dictatorships, or seeing someone die from starvation because they lost their small record book.

Thank you Moldova for yet again humbling me, your history has helped me see my own life more clearly.