Come and go

"I can't... remember... the name, gah!" I say in anguish as I try to give my sister the name of the restaurant my parents and I went to in the Marina district of SF a while ago.

"It was a really good place with excellent scallops and that... other thing we got, can't remember what -- risotto? something with duck?" my dad helps me along the process of recollection.

"Meh, I'll look it up on google later. It was a good place though."


This was a conversation I had just yesterday at one of SF's finest places to eat called Zuni Cafe. We were coincidentally talking about restaurants and none of us seemed to remember this quaint little restaurant that served pretty good tapas we went to a while ago (I looked it up today and it's called Isa).

Thinking about it later, I realized that I can eat at X amounts of nice restaurants -- from ones opened by renowned chefs, to ones with spectacular pre-fixes menus, to ones that source their ingredients from this and that local/organic farm, to ones that fetch impressive ratings on yelp... and yet... how many of those meals do I actually remember what I ordered and how I felt when I ate it? Or how about the restaurant's style, the ambiance?


No matter how spectacular or impressive the place, I remember but few fleeting flavors and delectable moments.

I must say that we humans are definitely creatures of habit... as we may not remember a dish we had somewhere someplace, but after a few tries at In n' out the taste makes a place in our memory harddrives. Likewise, I think we're the same with a lot of things -- remembering the likes of a person after just meeting them, what we learn in classes, the art we see in museums...

Everything has a moment, a place in our lives, but time smudges lines of faces that were once clear and muddles memories that were once fresh.

On a personal note, I think I forget/leave behind most things very easily. You can see that with the relationship with my things -- not much can make me happier than tossing out the unused, outdated or just things that annoy me for that moment. Things that were once well-cherished, shiny and new. These things come and go in my life and some things, in reality are more easy to let go them others. The relationship with some thing was once thriving. It was in my room and I would see it and use it. And then eventually I just had no use for it anymore and it was like I never had it at all to begin with.

This is a cold reality that also goes the same for human relationships. Like a nice meal at a restaurant, my experiences with people can be joyful and rich at the moment, but erode over time. It's so sad that we can forget all the laughs, the conversations, the sparks and replace it with apathy, weariness and irritation. I'm thinking that this must be the same mechanism for marriages that go downhill, for friends that hit rough patches, or just moving on in general.

Nothing lasts forever. Nothing remains. But there is a reason and a time for everything. I try to write things in my journal to help me remember. Maybe I should start some sort of food journal for my meals....


Amber