DO YOU REMEMBER HIM? HER? THEM? IT?

The past sometimes gets to be the present.  I have been having throw-back thoughts a lot lately and I have to smile at so many of them because they are downright pleasant.  Most of them have been about people, but in order to get the point across and get past the scantily clad females on Google, I chose to show a 1949 Hudson Wasp.  I won't bore you with how scantily clad can possibly be a logo for nostalgia.  But, I guess, on Google, when in doubt, slide anything into the open space.  Enough of that, already!
I'm sure so many of you think of people you knew when you were in school.  Since the names of the people I think of don't mean much, if anything to you, I'll just describe the characteristics that make them easy to remember.  So, the other day it was the girl in kindergarten who didn't stop crying for a week.  I remember her because she was very plain, and never got to be anything but "plain" as she grew up.  It took her a week to get over her separation anxiety and she lived a mere 100 yards away from the school.  She had a strange name, for us, since we didn't know Italian then.  Her name was Bella.  [With apologies to Antonio Phaneuf, my first cousin/quasi brother]  I think of him a lot.  Mainly I think of what he looked like when he was 17, and not 87!  I also think a lot about a bunch of cousins and quasi cousins that I went to school with.  They were a great bunch but I never grew up around them and the only influence they had on my development was the contact that we had in school.  We lived rather far apart, and they were second and third degree cousins, so we didn't have them in our lives at the first degree level, if you get my drift.  But I think of them a lot, and have been carrying them around in my head for about a month now.  [The Durand family, for those of you who know]  I think a lot about the first classmate of ours who died.  He was less than 20 if I remember correctly, and he died of natural causes, rather than of street violence or automobile accident.  He was followed by the classmate who had hydrocephalus [His cranium was enlarged due to poor drainage of fluid back into his system]  He had a hard time walking and he had a difficult time learning how to write.  He did surpass the first person to die by some years.  I have been thinking of my father's uncle Theo.  He is the person who had the gift of stopping bleeding.  He didn't have to touch the person.  All he had to do is to pray for the bleeding to stop, and it did.  He came to the United States one time [from Canada].  He was a huge human being.  A gentle giant with a booming laugh.  That was it.  I saw him twice for a total of 3 or 4 hours.  Never saw him again except in my mind, often.  Mainly I remember asking  myself what good was it to stop blood when the far away people like us couldn't reach him anyway?  I was not sassy enough in my childhood to ask him, but I was thinking of it, a lot.
As you know, I could go on about this for a long time.  But I won't.  I'm putting this before you to invite you to marvel at the wonder of our memory and the ability that we have to make the past vividly present in our lives.  I suppose that this too falls into the category of epistemology.  You remember that,right?  There are these moments in our lives when I think we have to stop and admire the mystery of what we are.  Not the mystery that we don't know, but the mystery that we believe in.  It is in this belief that we nurture the conviction of the truth about what we come to know about ourselves and about the rest of the humans with whom we live and by whom we are surrounded every day.  Now that I think of it, a 1949 Hudson with "step down into it" technology is a rather weak symbol of what I really wanted to express today.  But somehow it is better than the alternatives among which I made the choice.