The weather today is gorgeous.  The blue of our northern Catskill sky is rivaling some of the most glorious ones I’ve seen in the Mediterranean. Ula and I have been walking up and down the streets of Oneonta, her chosen destination for our day out, while she reviews menus and seating options, choosing the perfect spot to celebrate her completion of third grade.

I used to take the girls out together to celebrate the end of our school year.  But I’m so enthralled with who they are becoming as individuals, this year I’ve taken them each out alone.

Ula selects a cafe on Main Street with outdoor seating in back that overlooks our beloved mountain range.  The view is framed by the cascading petunias bursting out of the window boxes surrounding the space.

As she delves into her menu, I am suddenly carried away to a memory from when I was 20, sitting outside in a secluded cafe in the Pyrenees mountains, accessible only by a washed out dirt road, drinking wine and tasting aioli for the first time as Wisteria bloomed all around me.

I was a college student on spring break, and my latest ticket to Europe had been paid for by a Chinese financial analyst who wanted me, for the sake of propriety, to escort his fiancee, one of my school mates, over to London.  We were to enjoy the sites of the city together, but once the weekend came along, I was to make myself scarce.  Happy to oblige, I hopped a flight to Spain to find my Catalonian friend, a businessman from Barcelona.

He and I had met at the falls of Iguazu in Brazil one afternoon about a year prior.  We’d had dinner in Argentina.  Over the course of my remaining years in college, we met on three different continents, climbing mountains, exploring monasteries, dining in cafes, drinking wine, smoking cigarettes (don’t worry.  I never really inhaled), and tasting tasting tasting life.

I was never his girlfriend.  He had one of those already.  I was something else. His secret.  His sense of adventure.  His romantic muse.  His electricity. At that age,  I was ok with that.

It was on that mountain veranda when he drew in a cigarette, blew out the smoke slowly and said, “do you know why we do this?  Why we go to these places?  Why we keep finding each other?”  When I didn’t reply, he continued.  “Because the rest of our lives is so utterly forgettable.   We live, day in and day out, going to work, counting the numbers, making the sales, eating the food, going to bed, then doing it again and again.  And we get older.  And our bellies grow fatter, and our hair grows thinner.  And we can hardly remember one of the days that has passed.

…But every once in a while, we can escape.  We can run away to someplace different, take a holiday to someplace exotic,”  he stubbed out his cigarette and leaned forward, “share a meal with a beautiful mind.  And there.  That is the memory.  That is the color that stands out in a gray life.”

He’d have continued our affair indefinitely, I believe.  But his words haunted me, and eventually I  made a choice.  I wanted my whole life to be memorable…to be full of color and flavor.   I wanted every day to be in a beautiful place,  populated with the same people, over and over again, who would help me construct a patchwork of conversational souvenirs, working with me to keep as many memories alive and vivid as possible.  I didn’t want to endure drudgery to have a few ecstatic moments.  I wanted a full-color life.

The trouble is, I realize as I’m sitting in this cafe with my child, there is still a lot I’ve forgotten.  I try to remember the elements of each day for the past week. Maybe if I pulled out my calendar, I could piece it together.  Otherwise, while I am certain that I enjoyed each day, each one has already faded into a lovely color wash that simply forms the background of each present moment.

A dreary life can be be void of day-to-day memories.  But so can a colorful one.

“That lady over there brought an elephant to lunch,” Ula breaks into my revery and calls me back to the present.

“A what?”  I begin wildly whipping my head around.

“An elephant.”  She nods in the direction I’m to look.  “Careful.  Don’t be too obvious.  You don’t want to embarrass her.”

I slowly turn my gaze in the direction she is looking.  Sure enough, behind us sits a lady, probably in her sixties, with a stuffed gray elephant sitting across from her on the table.  They are sharing a Coca-cola.

I turn back and stare at Ula, wide-eyed.  She shrugs and pushes away her menu.  “Don’t be so surprised.  Everybody deserves a treat now and then.”

We order our meals.  She is beside herself, because I’ve permitted her to get a grilled cheese, something I never make for her at home.  It comes, and she can’t stop talking about it, marveling about how the white cheese oozes down the side of the bread, nearly puddling on the plate.  She sinks her teeth into it, lets her eyes roll back in ecstasy.  “Oh.  Mom.  You have to try this.  You’ve never had anything like this.  This.  Is.  Amazing.”  I am reminded of that first time I tasted aioli.

We finish our lunch, then nod to the lady and the elephant as we head back out to the street.  She watches us, but makes no move to acknowledge us.  A few blocks down, we amble into a bookstore.  Ula wants to buy something with the money she’s earned washing eggs.  I peruse the latest releases and leave her to her shopping.  A little while later, she’s standing in front of me, holding not a book, but a little stuffed elephant.  “I have to have this,” she tells me.  “And I have the money.” I smile.

She pays for the elephant and we leave the bookshop, stop at a coffee shop, then take our drinks out to the local park, where we find a tree to sit under beside a duck pond.  Ula has brought a long a book, Captain Underpants.   She snuggles into my lap and asks me to read to her while she cuddles her new elephant.  We spend the afternoon there, reading, talking, wandering about, visiting the playground.  At the end of the day we start walking back to our car.  She stops.  “Mom!”  Her face is flushed with panic.  “My elephant’s gone!”  She starts to cry.

We look around where we were sitting.  We trace our steps back to the bathrooms, back to the playground.  No elephant.  This is a good time to talk about letting things go, I decide.  We had the elephant, but now we don’t.  We can’t just cling to things.  She’s nine now.  She can handle this.

But I can’t.  We retrace our steps back to the duck pond.  We find the exact place where we sat.  From there, I scan the horizon and all the surrounding grounds of the park.  My eyes pick up on an anomalous shape in the grass near the basketball court.  Can it be?  I’m not sure, and I don’t want to disappoint her.  “Stay here!” I shout.  We are near a parking lot with a lot of moving cars.  “Don’t move off this grass!”  Leaving her, I break into a run, dashing between cars, through mud puddles.  I have to find that elephant.

Because now, it’s not just a stuffed toy.  It is better than the waterfalls of Iguazu, better than a jeep trail through the Pyrenees.  It is a grilled cheese sandwich eaten on a deck in the Catskill mountains, Captain Underpants beside a duck pond.  It is this day.  It is a marker to signify that one of these color-washed days will stand out on its own, offering us enough texture and detailed lines to make a complete picture in our memories, without us having to travel to some exotic place to grab it.

Maybe, someday, we will let the elephant go.  But right now, in this moment, we both need that elephant.  We need a little marker to remember that we shared a part of own day with a lady who took her elephant to lunch.

And there it is.  Beside the six foot giants dunking balls through the basketball hoop, just out of reach of a thundering herd of size 12 slapping sneakers.  I snatch it and run back to her.  She jumps up and down as I hold it up in victory.

I make it back to the duck pond, and she throws her arms around me.  In this moment, I am her hero.  And I am ecstatic.  Together, we have taken this day and turned it into a memory.