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Good memories are nice.

They're the not bad ones.

Sometimes it's hard to remember that. Bad memories, the little black holes they are, swallow out the rest and there they sit. Just sopping up the free rent in your cranium. Lazy squatters.

Once in a while it's nice to get a jolt of something I'd forgotten. Not great moments nor exciting ones. But ones where I was content or just relaxed. Here's a moment I hadn't thought of in ages. It caught me off guard in the middle of the night and I've sort of held on to it, for good measure. Why, I couldn't say.

The first time I went to Europe, I took a boat ride in Paris through the canals. I was really tired after walking the whole day, so I sat down beside this kid. A little girl, maybe four or five years old, sitting next to her mom. She kept taking off her shirt and babbling in ...French, I suppose. I really didn't have a clue. It wasn't English though and that's all I could at the time. She kept making smiley faces at me and giggling and I would wave at her or stick out my tongue. We kept sort of playing with each other, but not ever talking or touching.

It was a really beautiful warm evening and this little girl kept taking her shirt off and on and her mother seemed to be embarrassed, but not too concerned. She would quickly turn to her mom to say things and the look back at me expectantly as her mother just nodded slowly and grinned at me.
I remember that she had these clip-on plastic earrings. The little girl.
 Before I got off the boat, a gave the girl my pin from the trip, the one with my group name on it and stuff. She put her shirt down after having pulled it to cover up her face and I told her, half hoping she'd understand my English, to keep her shirt on so people would see the pin. Thinking that maybe it would save her mother some grief.
She put it on. But I don't know if she understood me.

I wonder if she still has that pin sometimes.