My dad remembered what everyone else forgot.
One time in Marseille, at La Foire de Marseille, a fair we went to every year, we were waiting to be seated when he spotted a man and walked over. Hi Charlie. The man had no idea who he was. Who are you? So my dad told him. You used to dance at the Vamping on Sunday afternoons, with Maguy, the one in the black and red dress. You always ordered a mauresque.
Charlie scratched his head. Then, detail by detail, his eyes opened. He was recovering each memory as my dad handed it to him, one by one, from thirty years away. It's true, he said.
Afterwards, my mom, my brother and I couldn't stop laughing. My dad did this all the time, and it still surprised us every time. We kept asking him: but how can you remember all these small details?
I wasn't the only one impressed. He could recall little details of people's lives that nobody else knew anymore, sometimes not even the people who had lived them. It was like a superpower, and I always wished I had it.
The Vamping is not there anymore. It stood by the plage des Catalans, facing the Mediterranée, and Marseillais danced there for decades. It was demolished in 2015. My dad kept it anyway.
Last October, I lost him.
By then, I had already been building Savor for over a year. An app that remembers where you went, who you were with, what you ordered. The little details.
We never really talked about it. I probably mentioned it, but he wasn't himself anymore.
Of all the lives to record, his was the one. The man kept everyone else's little details, and I never kept his. Nobody remembers everything, of course; we keep what we can, with photos, notes, journals. But I never even spent the time.
I'm spending it now, at Paquebot, a coffee shop in the Mont-Royal neighborhood in Montreal, my son and my wife next to me, an espresso in hand, Let It Happen by Tame Impala playing.
What if I could remember the little details of my life, with almost no effort?
Wouldn't that be wonderful?