BB Grey–musings

from, Chapter 4: Walnut Season

It starts like this: the end begins with the cards.

For years, I kept my life organized on 3×5 index cards—neat, white, lined. They lived in small gray boxes stacked on chrome wire shelves above the kitchen sink. Stainless, or trying to be. Twenty boxes, two deep, three high. A library of myself.

I used to think memory was a kind of architecture. You build it right, it holds. You label the boxes—Childhood, Marriage, Regrets, August 16th—and you assume the structure will stand. You trust the shelves.

Lately, though, the cards have begun to escape. They curl at the edges. The ink bleeds. Words I once wrote so carefully—first kiss, her laugh, the way light fell through the hospital window—now blur into shadows. Sometimes, when I pull a card, the center is just… gone. Erased. A white hole where a moment used to live.

I read somewhere that in ancient Rome, they threw walnuts at weddings. A hollow clunk against stone pavers—a sound like hope hitting the ground. I imagine all those walnuts rolling through narrow streets, not knowing they’re symbols. Not knowing some will be eaten by birds and swell inside them until something breaks.

I layed a driveway once. Lowe’s was out of the synthetic cobblestone pavers I wanted, so I settled for something gray and close enough. Now I wonder if that’s all memory is—the paver you settled for. Close enough. Almost what you wanted. Almost true. But that is not the work I do–so I don’t.

The cards keep fading. August 16th. The year I turned Christ’s age when he died minus three. She said yes. I said yes. Three children came after. Not cards. Not boxes. Living, breathing things. If I press my ear to the air, I can still hear their laughter like distant bells. But I have to be quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that invites erasers.

Maybe this is what they mean by dementia—not forgetting, but being rewritten. A slow, careless hand moving across your life, leaving blank spaces where love used to be.

I don’t worry about the birds eating walnuts. I’ve never seen it happen. But I understand the danger of holding onto something that can’t be digested. Something that swells inside you until you can no longer fly.

The shelves are still there. The boxes are still stacked. But the cards are becoming ghosts. And I am becoming the man who lives in the empty spaces between the lines.

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