like the corners of my mind

Over the past couple days, I've had a few instances of memory jogging. Stuff I hadn't thought about in years:

Maddie had a sleepover & her friend stated that her grandfather was missing a finger. That reminded me that my uncle Art has only a 1/2 middle finger, the other half cut off in a farm equipment accident. It was a source of great curiousity when my sibs & I were very young. The finger was stubby & bulbous at the end, the skin was somehow smoother than the rest of the hand. I could be wrong about the manner in which he lost his finger. I haven't thought about it for a long time & I haven't seen this uncle in even longer. It might be just an assumption that my mind has conjured knowing that my dad's family grew up on a farm.

I had a customer make a joke about the fact that his girlfriend bought safety pins & now he could pierce his ears. I was reminded of the times I had my ears pierced by friends. One was on or near my 19th birthday & I was at a party at "the trailer" in Clarion. This was a place that a couple of older friends had rented & was a frequent scene of mixed college & high school parties. I had someone pierce the top of my right ear cartilege. Another was when I had a friend pierce about the middle (probably 4th up from bottom) of my ear in my apartment in Allegheny Center in Pittsburgh. Then I had a memory of a friend piercing Bryan's ear in the same apartment. Her name was Heather. Her hands were shaking so badly and she was sweating. The boyfriend at the checkout counter then comments that really he wanted to pierce his nose with the safety pins. As they walked away, I was reminded of a day that I had blocked from my mind for a long time. I had pierced my own nose back in, like, 1989, in the bathroom of our apartment on Jackson St in Highland Park. It took a long time & when I walked out of the bathroom, Nikki's dad totally freaked out (not in a good way). (Yet another incident that doomed the relationship.) Whew, that's alot of memoires for the span of, say, 1 minute.

Finally, I had a customer bring in her little white toy poodle & I was reminded that we 2 little dogs like that when I was very young. The first was "Tickles", whom I named. I must have been 2 or so. She died from rat poison consumption, the poor thing. I remember my mom found her dead behind my dad's reclining chair. The chair was red vinyl that after time cracked & was hard where my dad rested his head -from the hair oil that he wore at the time, as I recall thinking. Anyway. the dog Tickles. I'm told -& I'm sure I've fabricated a visual memory from these re-tellings- that I had at one time wanted Tickles to come out from behind the couch so I crawled back there & pulled Tickles out by the tongue. She must have been a patient dog. The next white toy poodle we had was Snoopy & he was named by my brother. Don't remember what happened to Snoopy. Yesterday petting that little dog -Casey Jones- brought back tactile memories. Funny what one's body remembers.