As my body makes progress in its defiant march toward oldness, I’ve experienced more and more of the phenomenon I call “sudden memories”. What is happening is that my advancing age is dragging along behind it the range of years across which my memory is viable, and pulling that range beyond the point where it covered basically my whole adult life. So, much to my dismay, there are various occurrences from my adult past which are now deeply back-catalogued in my brain. Occasionally, however, something bubbles up to the surface, where it lingers a moment before bursting out into my consciousness with a soapy, almost audible pop. “Oh yeah! That thing!” I’ll exclaim aloud to the room or to my cat, whichever is paying more attention. That’s a sudden memory.

To give an example, a few days ago I was relaxing on my couch, playing a video game called Puzzle Quest. This was an activity which involved neither daughters nor people named Scott, so far as I could tell. Yet just as I was about to clear a row of blocks that stood in the way of my quest, I sat bolt upright and declared emphatically, “Scott’s daughter!”

Years ago, when I worked my first job at a McDonald’s in my hometown, my manager was a thin, mustached and pleasant man named—wait for it—Scott. A better boss one could not ask for, unless it were a boss at pretty much any other job. He and his wife juggled a three year old—here it comes—daughter, whose name, sadly, evades me now. Every so often when there was no other choice, Scott would bring his daughter to work with him. She was one of those rare jewels of a child who seemed never to cry, but would merely walk around with a tremendous smile permanently affixed to her lips, and jump up and down out of joy for just being alive. She had her dad’s eyes.

Most of the time she would sit in the break room, passively coloring placemats or watching fuzzy videotapes (Salt the Fries! was among her favorites). On the occasions when she would not be content with such unobtrusive activities, she’d hang out with her dad and me near the front of the store (well clear of anything dangerous). One time I had her hand someone’s bag of food out the drive-thru window to them, and in response to the person’s mortified stare I said conversationally, “They just hire them younger and younger at these places every year, don’t they?” The person simply glared at me and drove away.

Scott’s daughter called me “Bigman”. She was offered my real name by her father many times, but Bigman was what stuck. I wasn’t particularly large, so I can only assume that Scott, who was rather lanky, was the template based on which his young daughter viewed and categorized all men. “Is Bigman going to be there?” Scott informed me his daughter would ask when told she’d be escorting him to work. “Bye bye Bigman!!” she’d proclaim on her way out the door at the end of the day. “His name is Andy. A-n-d-y. Now what’s his name?” “Bigman!” I like to spell “Bigman” as one word because it makes me feel like a superhero, like Batman, rather than just a person of considerable dimensions.

The sudden memory that broke out into my thoughts this week was of one particular visit by Scott’s daughter. “Hi Bigman!” she greeted as I came in the door for work.

Out of her earshot Scott joked to me, “Andy, what are you showing my daughter when I’m not looking, that she calls you Bigman?”

Laughing, I replied, “Let’s see if you still have that same sense of humor about it ten years from now when she’s a teenager.” He solemnly agreed that yes, he’d probably have a different perspective then.

So I sat, my forgotten video game dangling from my hands, smiling delightedly at having reclaimed this moment from my past, like an excellent line of dialogue in a book you haven’t read in years and had forgotten about until now.

Then, grim realization broke upon me like a bitter Atlantic wave: That WAS ten years ago. “Then”, from back then, is now “now”. Somewhere, that little giggling girl with the huge grin and the crayons is now thirteen…maybe fourteen. She could be in high school. This very minute she could be fighting with Scott over knocking before he enters her room or setting too early of a curfew. People I once thought of as babies are nearing adulthood themselves. It’s just too crazy. Something I felt a glimmer of at my last birthday came flooding back: Where Is The Time Going?

For those of you who are somewhere around my age and would remember the same things I do, here are some more revelations about just how quickly the years are slipping away:

• It’s been over five years already since the September 11 attacks.
• The first Austin Powers movie came out almost ten years ago. So did Titanic. That’s a decade already.
• The OJ Simpson murders and Kurt Cobain’s suicide happened thirteen years ago. That’s also how long it’s been since Cheers and Star Trek: The Next Generation were showing new episodes.
• The first album by Pearl Jam and the last album by the Pixies came out in 1991: sixteen years ago.
• Back to the Future? Twenty-two years ago, my friend. We’re closer now to their fictional “future” than we are to the “present” of that film. Still no flying cars though.

As time advances, and things I still think of as contemporary yellow and peel and turn into relics, I’m beginning to realize that sudden memories are really my only windows into my life the way it used to be. Don’t misunderstand me: my life today is a pretty good place to be from where I’m standing. So long as I retain my inner youth, Bigman will live on.

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Just as a side note, I had originally intended to write about this story today. Apparently Keith Richards, after his father died and was cremated, snorted his father’s ashes like cocaine. As I tried to come up with ways to dress this up in a blog entry, I realized that there just is no dressing it up. How can I possibly make a story like that any more outrageous than it already is? It’s already fifty-seven varieties of fucked up. It’s the kind of thing I’d expect to see on a subversive comedy sketch show, laugh at how absurdly morbid it is, and wish I’d thought of it first.