“You wrote a really fun story about mackerel.”
“Oh, you liked it?”
My daughter and I were walking out of the café, laughing and talking.
“Do you know what it’s called in English?” I said.
“What?”
“Mackerel. It’s mackerel.”
And just saying the word brought back a memory from Edinburgh.
When I was studying there, I rarely had a chance to eat fish. Then one day, I saw whole mackerel laid out at a fish stall near the street.
I was so happy to see something familiar that I immediately pulled out my phone and looked up the word.
Mackerel.
I pointed at the fish.
“Is this mackerel?”
“Yes.”
Then I needed to figure out how to ask the man to prepare it.
I looked up another word.
Chop.
So I asked him to chop the fish.
He picked up the two mackerel I had bought, carried them to a cutting board farther inside, and started working.
“Chop, chop, chop, chop…”
He seemed almost cheerful.
I watched him and thought, He really seems to enjoy his job.
Then I took my fish home.
When I opened the package, I stopped.
Both mackerel had been chopped into pieces about three or four centimeters long.
The whole fish.
Oh.
So that was what “chop” meant.
I split the pieces open myself, salted them, and grilled them.
They were delicious.
The next time I went back, I was much more specific. I tried to explain that I wanted the fish opened along the belly and then cut in half.
Eventually, even that became too much trouble.
I would simply ask for one cut, take the fish home, and finish the rest myself.
I told my daughter all of this with great enthusiasm.
She listened to the whole story. Then she smiled.
“Mom, do you know how many times you’ve told me that story?”
I laughed.
Really?
She had known the whole time.
And there I was, telling it with all the excitement of someone who had just remembered it for the first time.
“Well,” I said, “I guess people do that. Sometimes we tell the same story again and it still feels new to us.”
We got into the car.
On the way home, we kept talking about Edinburgh.
Years after I had studied there, our family had traveled there together.
“Don’t you remember my old student residence?” I asked. “We even took pictures in front of it.”
She didn’t.
Instead, she remembered something else.
During that trip, we stayed in a place with our own kitchen. We bought meat, vegetables, and fruit from a nearby shop and cooked our own meals.
One day, my daughter and I went to a Chinese market to buy some Korean ingredients. It was farther than we expected, and we had walked quite a bit. It was cold, and we were hungry.
On the way, we spotted a café and went inside to warm up.
We ordered hot coffee and toast. From where we sat, we could see the cook making pizzas.
The cook had several balls of dough ready. When an order came in, he picked one up and began stretching it with practiced hands. Then he paused, looked at the dough for a moment, and tossed it into the trash.
He simply picked up another ball of dough, started again, and slid the pizza into the wood-fired oven.
We watched, a little surprised.
Oh. He didn’t like it, so he just threw it away.
That was what she remembered.
Not my student residence.
Not the place I had lived.
A ball of pizza dough being tossed into a bin.
I laughed.
And suddenly it seemed funny that we had traveled through the same city together and carried home completely different pieces of it.
I had my mackerel.
She had her pizza dough.
Maybe memory is simply like that.
We don’t carry everything with us.
A fish on a market stall stays.
A piece of dough flying into a trash bin stays.
Other things disappear completely.
And sometimes a story stays so alive that we tell it again and again—
each time with the strange pleasure of someone telling it for the first time.
