The Elusive Memories of One's Life

The other day my sister Anita...who lives in what might be the last remaining rational part of Texas...was on the phone with me.  Anita is someone that I can never get tired of talking with...she always has interesting things to say and very enthusiastically wants to know about what I'm thinking and doing.  We were going over the topic of each of our personal recollections about our childhoods and wondered why it seemed to be that the old, old memories were easier to conjure up than things that happened in more recent times.  I volunteered my own opinion of why this might be so: when you are young, your responsibilities in the world are relatively few and, when you are in different settings, you have more freedom to look around and observe without the need to focus your attention on just those things that you would need to act upon.  As you grow older, you learn to filter out those things in your experiences that don't bear on your priorities.  And that includes not just ignoring the decorations in a grocery store, the cloud formations above, or the furnishings in an office, but also memories of whole periods of time that don't seem to have any relevance to your current life. But I believe that all of the memories are there in our minds, even if it has been decades since we have thought of them.  The trick is how to tease them out...

For my own purposes, I classify memories into one of two groups: trends and special events. These seem...although I'm no expert in neurology...to come from different types of thinking.  With trends, you can sometimes patch together a sense of what regular life was like in different periods, noting where you lived, who you were with, where you worked or went to school or elsewhere or stayed at home, how you dressed, what TV shows you watched, what songs you liked, how you ate, dressed, and so on.  But special events are a different type of memory...maybe it would be better to call them "punctuated events" because sometimes these memories are not of anything particularly special but have for some reason endured through the years nevertheless.  Like me looking, outside in my front yard in the year 1962, at a Detroit Tigers player's baseball card and marveling at how they wrote the capital letter "D".  Or standing out on the front porch, when I was about two years old, and being told that we weren't allowed to play on the swing set far over (to the left)...the one nearby sadly had no swings.  Or my father, around that time, giving demonstrations to the neighborhood of his ability to stand on his head, performing the feat to an informal crowd outside on the lawn.  "First time" memories can be of this group: I become an avid reader of Mad Magazine in the mid-1960s (a "trend" memory), so it shouldn't come as a surprise that I can recall where I first saw this publication, a couple of years before in a news/magazine shop next to a 7/11 store off Taft Street in West Hollywood (a "special event" memory).  And of course, whenever a major news event happens, like the assassination of John Kennedy or 9/11, most everyone remembers in great detail what they were doing at the time...

There are different ways to draw out memories, listening to music being one that works well for me.  Starting in late 1963 just before the Beatles exploded in popularity here and continuing more or less to the present day, I have unconsciously associated different songs I've heard with concurrent events going on my life.  With Gale Garnett's 1964 Sing in the Sunshine, I'm sitting on the back porch with my mother and Anita.  Whenever I hear Ticket to Ride, a 1965 hit from the Beatles, I think of my father taping it on his giant primitive tape recorder and endlessly playing it back.  Somebody had a radio once during one of my high school track team's practices in April 1973 and Stealer's Wheel's Stuck in the Middle With You just happened to be on.  Steve Windwood's Higher Love (a hit at the time) and the Carpenters' We've Only Just Begun (played at the ceremony) remind me of my September, 1986 wedding with Melissa. At Valdosta, Georgia's Wild Adventures theme park in early 2002 I heard, from a loudspeaker, Madonna's song Music while my son and daughter began their slow climb at the start of the Cheetah wooden roller coaster ride...it would be the last time I was too "chicken" to ride it.  And on and on it goes, with hundreds of songs eliciting different memories...

I already probably have too many personal projects going on right now, so starting a new one may not make much sense.  Still, I think devoting a little time regularly to remember my own past would be fruitful in the long run.  Call it a "personal memory project"...