Marjorie and I have just come from taking our Vanuatu Young Single Adult soccer team to a game.  They’re fun to watch.  It’s amazing how they can handle the ball with their feet.  They make the most incredible moves.  I observed to Marjorie that if I was playing, all that I’d be able to do would be to run up and down the field.

She agreed that it would be the same with her…“Unless, of course, it was a game of badminton.  I took a class of badminton in college.  I had to have a PE class, and that was all that was left.  Remember the badminton game we played with our neighbors in Morocco?”

“No, I don’t remember a thing about it.  I couldn’t even tell you that we’d ever played a game of badminton together.”

“Don’t you remember the big girl who lived in the apartment to the right of us?  She and her husband were always fighting.”

“She had dark hair, didn’t she?”

“No, that was the couple that was there when we moved in.  They didn’t stay there long.  This girl told me that she was raised as a Mormon.  She said it while standing there smoking a cigarette.  I said, ‘Really?’ and she said, ‘Well I was raised in the Reorganized Church, but my husband is a Catholic, so I became a Catholic.  I like it better.  It’s a lot easier.’

“One day she had to go somewhere, so her husband came over to ask me to change their baby’s diaper.  He’d never done it before…Remember?... Before I could answer, you jumped up and said, ‘Here, I’ll show you how it’s done.’  The baby had a bad diaper, and you walked him through the process.”

“Good for me, and no, I don’t remember.”

“They had some other couples over for the 4th of July, and asked us if we wanted to join them.  We declined, but they came back later and asked us to play badminton.  It was us against that couple.  We couldn’t do anything wrong.  We beat them so bad that they got mad.

“Another couple got up and challenged us.  We beat them just as badly.  Everyone was against us.  They were yelling, ‘Don’t let those Mormons win!’ but we did.

“That couple was always fighting.  When they were moving out, they were screaming at each other.  They were mad at their baby, and yelling at it because it wouldn’t quit crying.  I went over and asked if I could take care of their baby while they were trying to move.  She was trying to clean the refrigerator, and she’d never done it before.  It was awful.  I took the baby and sang to it, and it quieted right down and never made another sound.  I was afraid they were going to hit it.”

“I’ll bet it got hit many times.  I’ll also bet that none of those servicemen couples are still together, either.”

“Oh, I’m sure they aren’t.  What was the girl’s name that lived on the left side of us?—Jackie.  She was already tired of her husband.  What was his name?—Mike!”

“How do you remember all this?  These things happened 45 years ago.  I can see Jackie and Mike in my mind’s eye, but I couldn’t have told you their names, and I certainly don’t remember the other couple or anything about a badminton game.  I remember a little about the couple before them, but only because they were so disgusting.  They did a lot of fighting, too.”

“Oh, I remember being in the kitchen one night when they started fighting.  I got so scared that I ran and jumped into bed with you.”

—And to think that I was there!  Marjorie is forever dredging up these memories of things that I would swear never happened.  This is why I write.  Otherwise the memory would be gone.  But not in Marjorie’s case.  She has a better mental filing system than I do.  It’s all still there in her head.