Momentous moments are hardly that..

..hold that thought..i think i shall introspect! you know how in life you seem to remember certain moments very strongly, and most of them are invariably associated with brief triumphs and sorrows. Yet a lot of them are just random and simple. So i wanted to make a list here of the random stuff just in case I forget in the future:

Crying and feeling horrible when I was first sent to some sort of Kindergarten school. I remember staring at a ladder for a long time and wanting to climb out.
Somehow counting the number of rungs it had again and again made me calm down..strange.

My eighth birthday when my Mom baked 8 cakes for me, with frosting and all..in different shapes and sizes. I spent many days after that choosing which cake I would partake of that day. I get the taste of those cakes in my mouth just by recalling those days.

1986 - a famous India-Pakistan cricket game where Javed Miandad hit a six
of the last ball. Holy shit! I sat on the swing outside of my house and swung slowly and mindlessly for what seemed a long time. Probably my first encounter with true despondence! I was staring into space without looking for the longest time..

I loved my school..the warm winter afternoons where we would play dodgeball, soccer, tennis-ball soccer, cricket, baseball with cricket rules, or just some made-up games (one where 12-15 guys played hand-wall-tennis alternating by ethnicity or some such thing!). I can recall our favorite soccer pitch, the so-called "greenbelt" (which was more brown and dusty than green) where we played hours of soccer. I remember the 5 on 5, all the players, and the time when I returned from soccer with multiple bruises that took a week to heal and it hurt to walk - I was so proud of myself! The scolding from
the folks made it all the more enoyable, little though they knew.

Everyone has a crush in school - I was no exception. I dont remember her face very well now, but I remember her holding a test tube of some yellow solution
(Cadmium sulphide i think but i could be wrong) in Chem Lab. She was looking at it, I at her, and I remember feeling very weak in the knees:) Perhaps that explains why I married a molecular biologist who works a lot in the lab!

College was a bore, I learned more physics by myself sitting at home than from my college profs (i hope now that I am one, my students don't all think that way!) - anyway, nothing stands out among those years but this:
I used to play wall-tennis at home: this is where you can whack the ball again and again and I would alternate consecutive hits between imagined identities - my favorite was Edberg. I remember once how Edberg thrashed Sampras 6-2 6-2 6-2 in 1 hour and 20 minutes, though I tried to play no favorites. This could never happen in reality but it did on my terrace:) Man, Edberg played beautifully that day! Countless hours of my life were spent this way and I would not trade it for any amount of fun with any number of friends that I didn't have at that age.

I strongly recommend experiencing unrequited love, specially one that creeps up on you and that's way out of your league- its fantastic in its own way and at least I tried in my own bumbling way. Eventually, when the mind-fog cleared and I realized the futility, I could not move from the bed or eat for an entire day (though I remember munching an apple from morning to night and watching the shadows cover the walls of the room). I listened to "Unwell" by Matchbox 20 about 20 times that day. At a recovery period of 1 day, you can say I am quite resilient in this respect - I was totally fine the next day and back to full happiness in a week.

I have taken many road trips in the US - I love them and recall many of them, mostly because the scenery in the US is so beautiful. The one I best remember is driving from Boston to Montreal through some mountains in Vermont, in the fall. "The Package" from APC was playing on my CD player in the car. It was a perfect moment, inside and outside. Then there is the time I drove in blinding snow in the middle of the night from Chicago to Detroit in peak winter to get a Canadian visa - hmmm, that was a real adventure in lane-changing and braking.

wonder which and how many more of life's moments will make it though the
filter - usually, its the ones you never think much about. (I have left out plenty that are too personal of course!). Most of such moments are probably dumb from a rational point of view and when viewed in hindsight, but I prefer to believe that such things stitch your life together in some way.