A Gesture.
At the end of troop meetings, you had to recite the pledge above while holding your hand up, pointing index, middle and ring fingers. It was sort of awkward to hold your pinkie down like that with your thumb. Maybe it was just my small hands that got in the way of dexterity. But I persevered, for courage, looking to the cool and slender fingers of Leslie Rollo. They slipped into this gesture effortlessly. She was the requisite tall girl of the troop. Anyway the three fingers are the manual manifestation of the trefoil, our troop leader explained, the shamrock-like coat of arms used to symbolize the Girl Scouts.

Memory Fragments.
Recently my mother found my sash, stained and musty from a decade and a half of garage storage. It's funny when your memory of something doesn't match up with the evidence. You feel inept and old. Upon examining the sash, I noticed that troop number 128 or 163 or some other inconsequential number was sewn onto it. But wait a minute, I remember specifically, being troop number 388. It was like someone had gone and changed it without me knowing. Momentarily, all my happy memories of the past were called into question. Even objects, photographs, the concrete things we rely on to provide us with memories our faulty minds are sometimes unable to furnish, had become unreliable. This disjointed situation vexed for longer than it should of. What was obstructed by the weird mechanisms of my mind that shut out some memories, throwing a monolithic 388 in its path, was that I had joined a new troop when my family moved to the east coast. The object, the sash, had changed with me. Our personal objects can have an organic life all their own, carrying on their own existence parallel to our lives, even when we don't realize it. We must let things change, too.

submitted by Erin Donnelly
New York City USA
June 1997

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