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I am constantly mystified by what John ends up remembering_ I just don__ understand why he__ able to hang on to information like that, while so many other more important memories evaporate. Then again, I suppose so much of what stays with us is often insignificant. The memories we take to the ends of our lives have no real rhyme or reason, especially when you think of the endless things that you do over the course of a day, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime. All the cups of coffee, hand-washings, changes of clothes, lunches, goings to the bathroom, headaches, naps, walks to school, trips to the grocery store, conversations about the weather__ll the things so unimportant they should be immediately forgotten. Yet they aren__. I often think of the Chinese red bathrobe I had when I was twenty-seven years old; the sound of our first cat Charlie__ feet on the linoleum of our old house; the hot rarefied air around aluminum pot the moment before the kernels of popcorn burst open. I think of these things as often as I think about getting married or giving birth or the end of the Second World War. What is truly amazing is that before you know it, sixty years go by and you can remember maybe eight or nine important events, along with a thousand meaningless ones. How can that be?You want to think there__ a pattern to it all because it makes you feel better, gives you some sense of a reason why we__e here, but there really isn__ any. People look for God in these patterns, these reasons, but only because they don__ know where else to look.Things happen to us: some of it important, most of it not, and a little of it stays with us till the end. What stays after that? I__l be damned if I know.(pp.174-175)