When I was a pre-schooler, I achieved fame for my ability to identify 1950's cars and their models. I made it into Jim Kinney's Beachcomber column in the Pope County Tribune. I have absolutely no recollection of this. It's a case of "infused memory", thinking you remember something but it's really something people have told you about yourself.
Cognitive psychologists have termed this "childhood amnesia" and is the case for almost all of us, attributed most probably to immature brains. Early childhood is lost to us. What is your earliest "non-infused" memory? Often it is something dramatic etched into your hippocampus. I can vividly remember wandering off and the thrilling ride up an escalator in Powers Department Store and the panic when I could not figure out how to get back down. I remember the 1954 total eclipse when my parents awakened me at 6:00 AM to cross the street in my pajamas to my grandparents' back yard to look up at the sky - maybe with sunglasses, no eclipse glasses back then. I know that my first home was an apartment above the Dahl House but I have no recollection of its interior, while I can visualize every nook and cranny of my second childhood home on Drury Avenue.
If we could remember what we can’t remember, we might live our lives entirely differently. But, then again, perhaps our subconscious knows best. I don’t think a life of perfect recall would be all that pleasant. Some things are best left unremembered. And the memories we do have may be suspect. It is human nature to color our memories to be more favorable to our role in them than what was true in reality. No two people remember the same event in the same way. Makes jury duty challenging. Memory as we'd like it to be becomes the reel we play in our head. Fodder for your therapist. Collective memory is even more corrupt. What passes for fact in the minds of vast numbers is astounding. But that for another day.
As I age I spend more time remembering the past. After all, there's much more of that than my future. We accumulate a lot of memories. But why do we remember what we remember and why does our memory have such yawning gaps? (If you could answer that question, you would undoubtedly be famous and have uncovered something new about the workings of the human mind.)
Memories intrude for no understandable reason. What dictates what thoughts, images or stories come to the fore? Most people recognize that smell triggers memory. Doughnuts deep frying puts me immediately in my grandmother's kitchen. New mown alfalfa puts me on a hayrack on Tim's farm. Someone’s “Do you remember …” can fire some dormant synapses. Photographs! Too bad most of my life was constrained by 24 shot Kodachrome. Fill up your phone with memories - and do a backup occasionally.
But memory’s dominant characteristic is randomness. Aunt Myrt pops in for a visit. Some bit of music floats by and decides to overstay its welcome. My strikeout to end the game - as batter, not pitcher - reliving the pain. A young lady sits down next to me at a school choir concert. Flying over the handlebars - not the flight, the landing. Twin grands in NICU. A visit to the USS New Jersey with son Matt. None of these memories are sought - they just pop up arbitrarily. And one thought leads to a tangent thought until you've got a messy neural network competing. And then - poof, gone. And more often than I care to admit, a thought is present only until I enter a different room. What was that again?
Which leads to the realization that memory portends something ominous - its disappearance. Names in particular often reach the end of my tongue but go no further. Is this how it starts? I take heart over a brilliant thinker flogging himself because he couldn't remember the person he met last week. But I am still waiting for the explanation why names are so vulnerable. This is one of the reasons I dive into genealogy. I enjoy preserving family history online. (Bonus. I can do lookups to defeat my memory lapses!) It's unlikely that any of my family or my descendants will give a hoot about this tree of knowledge, but at least I satisfy my desire to remember those in the past.
Memories are a comfort but of course they also evoke regrets. You wish you had not done certain things or done things you did not. But to leave the past behind would eliminate the great joys. Savor your memories wherever they come from.
Hoplin-Pearson-Rosten-Blair tree. The tree is public, but those in it still living are privatized
Copyright © 2024 Dave Hoplin
