The Best Day of Your Life

 If you are one of the very rare individuals gifted with the highly superior autobiographical memory recall ability known as Hyperthymesia, possibly you could sift through all the days of your life and, in almost photographic detail,  identify which of all the days you have lived would qualify as " the best day of your life."  MariLu Henner claims to have this ability, which would put her in an elite group of only about 100 persons who were ever so identified. (I have seen her demonstrate this phenomenon   several times on tv shows where the host would pick a date purportedly at random,  and she would describe all the events of that day. I was not convinced, but that's just my opinion.)  

  Anyway, if ordinary people were to name the best day of their lives, I suppose many would say graduation, wedding day, births of a child, meeting first love, attending first prom, buying first house, winning some trophy or contest, traveling to some beloved country or venue, maybe even viewing an eclipse or other natural and rare event.

 In my own experience and observations, the memorable days like those above were always accompanied by some outlying factors which introduced a certain measure of uncertainty and stress into or onto the occasion.

  If I could review all my days and try to ascertain what was the best day of my life, I think it might be a very simple and unremarkable day, easily and quickly forgotten unless resurrected by a thought such as this:

  It could be one of those chilly but sunny spring days or a warmer summer day, a day like this: As too  rarely  happened when we were kids, my mother was done with her chores and housekeeping. It was probably a weekend and the family car, a big old Hudson or Nash or something, was parked in the driveway outside the garage. My mother would sit in the front seat and my sister and I would climb into the big  roomy back seat, with a kitten or dog on our laps. My mother was not a storyteller per se, but there would be talking and warmth and comfort. One of those rare days could have been the best day of my life. Except that it ended too soon.