Memory

I haven't been posting quotes and prompts every day like I promised.  I also remembered that I really ought to have a mini-cassette recorder in my car, especially for my morning drive.  Why?  Because while driving to work I thought of around 5 or 6 beginning lines of a poem, or least some kind of concept.  Once I got to work, settled in, answered some email inquiries, I had completely forgotten the morning words.  I remembered that I had thought of something during my drive home and began trying to rack my brain to recall a word or two that might trigger the rest of it, but no.  I have never been good with memorization of whole exact sentences.  I am better at remembering the overall context, and then side-line info like what I was feeling when I heard it, where I was, maybe the other people involved, and probably what else I was thinking about at the same time.  My memory is like a snapshot photo.  It cannot capture audio very well at all, only snatches of it caught in the jumbled signal.  But the scene will be in sharp focus.
The other night I thought of this phrase while I was in a coffee shop looking out the window and down the street: "I saw an echo of you walking."  There's not a whole lot to that sentence, and there's plenty that can be inferred.  I know who I was thinking of, where it was, why I thought of this person, and how I felt when I thought of that phrase, and every time I see it I will always recall all those details.
So yes, I need to dig out that mini-cassette recorder.  It is the camera for my poetry.