What I Remember Most by Cathy Lamb

Services Division
    Child’s Name: Grenadine Scotch Wild
    Age: 7 (Seven years old!)
    Parents’ Names: Freedom and Bear Wild (Location Unknown)
    Date: May 26, 1983
    Goal: Adoption
    Employee: Connie Valencia
     
    I visited Grenadine and she is thriving, in this home.
     
    Connie Valencia
    Children’s Services Division
    Child’s Name: Grenadine Scotch Wild
    Age: 7 (Still seven!)
    Parents’ Names: Freedom and Bear Wild (Location Unknown)
    Date: October 22, 1983
    Goal: Adoption
    Employee: Connie Valencia
     
    I visited Grenadine and she is thriving in that home Berlinsky.
     
    Connie Valencia
    The Oregon Journal
    CSD Case Worker Inebriated, Arrested On Highway
     
    November 8, 1983
    By Rolando Krawchek
     
    A case worker with the Children’s Services Division was arrested at two o’clock Wednesday afternoon by police. Her car was weaving back and forth across the freeway and reached speeds of eighty miles per hour before crashing into a guardrail. She was arrested after she failed field sobriety tests and taken to the hospital in an ambulance when she passed out.
    Case worker Connie Valencia had alcohol, pot, and cocaine in her system. She had one of the children she supervises in the car. That child, a seven-year-old boy, sustained a concussion, broken ribs, and a broken ankle. He spent the night in the hospital but is listed in stable condition. His biological mother has said she will sue CSD from her cell in Teal Creek Correctional Institution.
    Valencia was charged with driving under the influence, reckless driving, and endangering a minor child.

11
    I will never forget how I found out Covey was a lying, cheating scum eater.
    I was finishing a collage in my upstairs studio for a woman named Divinity Star, who was coming by that day to pick it up. Divinity is the chief accountant of a computer firm during the day, where she goes by the name Ellen Horowitz, but in her after hours she believes she is living her fourth lifetime. She belongs to a group of ditzy women who also believe they have past lives.
    In her previous lifetimes Divinity was a peasant in Russia who inspired a minirebellion and was then burned at the stake (which is why Divinity says she doesn’t like fire), a French baker who hid people behind his loaves of bread during the French Revolution (which is why Divinity says her bread-making skills are magical), and a Canadian with royal lineage (which might explain her self-indulgent and entitled personality).
    She asked me to attend one of her meetings with other people with multiple lives the first time I met her to plan her collage.
    “You’re kidding, right?” I said. “I don’t want to know what I did in past lives. I’ve had enough of this one.”
    She tilted her head, a pained, patronizing expression on her face like, “You are naïve. You are closed-minded,” then patted my arm, as if I were a dumb pet. “That’s a shame you don’t want to know your true self.”
    “Who are you to tell me what I want and don’t want?” My tone was sharp, and I knew it.
    “Women should know their true, eternal, ethereal selves.” Divinity flapped her hands like she was a magical fairy. “We have to know what’s happened before this journey, the dangers and passionate lovers, the adventures and murders and lessons and rendezvous. I want you to know the core of yourself, deep inside, Dina. I’m sorry you won’t take that step with me.”
    “Hey, Divinity,” I told her, pointing a purple pencil in her direction. “If you want to believe in this celestial, past-life, fantasy-fluff crap, go ahead, but don’t be condescending to me because I don’t believe I’ve been recycled through the last two thousand years.”
    Her mouth dropped, the ethereal image vanishing. “I’m sorry, Dina. I didn’t mean it like that.”
    “Good.” I am sensitive to people trying to undermine me or yank me down to the rung below them on the ladder. My place on the ladder is precarious enough as it is. “If you did,