Our family stopped overnight in Lincoln, Nebraska as we relocated from South Charleston, West Virginia to Seattle. My sister and I contented ourselves during the long days of driving with a new toy each day, drawn from red, yellow, and black drawstring bags sewn and filled by Dad’s mom. We got to pet the cat, too, who was amazingly quiet (for a cat riding in a car), resigned to whatever fate his humans had in mind for him.
Cat independence will out, however. We put him in the garage provided by our motel unit (you have to be Person of a Certain Age to remember that amenity) and went off to dinner. We returned after dark to find that someone had opened our garage door, and the cat had left the scene. My five year-old self was crushed.
Cat was independent but not stupid. He hung around so that Dad was able to find him. The next morning, our traveling party intact, we drove off to our new lives in Seattle. Cat lived for quite a little while in his new digs.
Why do some memories last a lifetime? A friend and regular reader of these lines encouraged me to think and write about that question. He noted that he vividly recalls his parents’ angst over Pearl Harbor, what he was doing when JFK was shot and when the planes hit the twin towers. Equally vivid are memories of a chemical plant explosion 50 years ago and the San Francisco earthquake.
“So,” he complained, “why can’t I remember why I walked into the room?”
There is much scholarship about memory. There is understanding that sufferers of dementia often recall memories of long ago more readily than of a minute ago, although my one experience with this observation casts doubt. Judy’s step-dad, deep into Alzheimer’s, told me stories about his youth that included features of modern life in settings from before the features were invented.
Other scholars probe animal memory trying to understand how the brain programs behavior. This is akin to the muscle memory I am encouraged to develop about my golf swing though my frequency of playing leaves me deep in muscle amnesia.
The examples my friend gave involve big events. I have similar recollections about where I was when major stuff happened. So, I expect, do you. I have no explanation for my friend for this shared proclivity to connect a personal relationship to a cataclysmic event, except to say that magnitude probably matters. An assassination or killer earthquake is likely to demand a place in the CPU of my memory.
More puzzling to me are memories like mine of Lincoln, Nebraska in November 1951. I know that some of the things I claim as memory are actually a response to a photo I have seen, giving me a graphic image to record. So, for example, I don’t actually remember crawling out of the dog house in the backyard in South Charleston at age three wearing a snow suit and looking cute, but I can conjure that “memory” even as I write these words because I have seen the photo.
There was no photo of the garage at the motel. There is no picture of the red, yellow, and black drawstring bags sewn by my grandmother. Yet, in the theater of my mind, those pictures are as vivid as that dog house.
There is another powerful image I carry around for which there is no photograph. It is of Mr. Carey’s 11th grade English classroom in September, 1962. I am sitting in the back of the center row of desks. Directly in front of me is a dark-haired girl I thought I might like even though she was Catholic (we carried odd prejudices in those days). In front and to my left in the 2nd seat in her row along the windows sat another dark-haired girl wearing a two-toned blue and white horizontally striped sweater.
Mr. Carey offered two free tickets to that week’s home football game to students willing to pass out programs at the game. (It was only later that I realized that the tickets were not, technically speaking, free if I had to work for them but I was date-surfing and therefore distracted). I intended to ask one of those girls and get a “free” date.
I can’t recall all of the reasons why I chose as I did. What I do recall, as clearly as I recall anything, is that scene of Mr. Carey, the two girls, and me.
I chose well. 54 years later, we are still together. That would qualify as a major event for me.
When my brother and I get together, invariably he will say “remember when” and start some memory of his about something we did together many years ago that I cannot recall. I joke that I should interview him to find out about my life. It is obvious that I do not have an extraordinary capacity for memory. (On NPR was the story of a man who remembers everything and the burden that is.)
Maybe one day science will answer my friend’s question. I won’t hurry to know why. Good times, bad times, times of big events, charming little details; all of these comprise my memory for unknown reasons. I’m okay with the mystery.
How about you?
Daniel E. White
May 2, 2016