Photo by sarandy westfall on Unsplash
“As I turned fifty, the world and my place in it looked much different than I had imagined they would. I have come to place tremendous value on the intensity and power of the moment, since I could never be sure a moment would last in memory. It must be savored…”
-- Floyd Skloot in The Shadow of Memory
Tomorrow is based on the past. There is no tomorrow without the past. Imagining what the future will be like, has a tendency to invoke thoughts about memories. As an elder, I’ve been contemplating memories and the role in our lives. A few years ago, I celebrated my sixty-fifth birthday. I don’t feel my age—the supposed age of retirement. I’m still going strong in my writing career. This birthday causes me to pause and reflect on my past, who I am, what I’ve become and my accomplishments.
While sitting in the yard watching the hummingbirds buzz around I stop to think about my birthday. Being in nature can do that to you. It can propel you backwards and then as quickly whip you into the present.
My mind has become a lattice of memories. This morning, I woke up, rolled over in bed, and glanced at a stack of half-read books on my bedside table. My mind pirouettes back to my mother’s bedside table of many books piled high, but unlike mine, hers were piled open and facedown.
The book on top of my pile is, The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig. My mother recommended this book because it depicts my grandmother’s era, whose story I chronicled in my first memoir, Regina’s Closet: Finding My Grandmother’s Secret Journal. My grandmother was born in 1903, the same place where Zweig’s family originated. Both Zweig’s family and my grandmother who was orphaned during World War I, decided to settle in Vienna before the end of the war.
Each evening after settling in bed, I glance at Zweig’s book and am reminded of my beloved grandmother. I reflect upon her difficult beginnings being orphaned at the age of eleven, and her subsequent immigrations. I think about how I credit her with my passions for writing and reading, after all, it was on her typewriter, where at the age of six, my first story emerged.
I think about how some memories cannot be shaken from our essence. In his book Searching for Memory, Daniel Schacter mentions two psychologists, Roger Brown and James Kulick who call some memories “flashbulb memories.” They believe that memories are formed from shocking events that activate a special brain mechanism called Now Print. Similar to a camera’s flashbulb, the Now Print preserves or “freezes” whatever happens at the moment when the shocking news is heard. This might be why the image of my grandmother remains so strong today, as does the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in the 1960s, and the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001.
I go to the kitchen and pull open the refrigerator door and my eyes scan the nearly empty shelves. I pull out a container of freshly squeezed orange juice. It’s time to go grocery shopping. My father, a Holocaust survivor, used to go berserk whenever our refrigerator was near empty. “I saw too much hunger during the war,” he’d say. For him, food was synonymous not only with life, but with security. An empty refrigerator was the major source of disagreement between my parents.
Who knows why I remember all these details of my childhood and why some incidents I cannot remember at all? Schacter says, “We have now come to believe that memory is not a single or unitary faculty, as was long assumed. Instead, it is composed of a variety of distinct and dissociable processes and systems. Each system depends on a particular constellation of networks in the brain that involve different neural structures, each of which plays a highly specialized role within the system.”
I think about those who have lost the ability to remember their past and how memories instill so much texture into our lives. Writer Frank Skloot, for example, contracted a virus which attacked his brain and thus his ability to remember. He seems devastated and frustrated by his memory loss and says, “Among the functions that have been damaged, the one I am most troubled by is the corruption of memory…After more than a dozen years, I am still not used to it. My memory, in all its aspects, has been destabilized.” Although I am Skloot’s age and have not sustained a trauma to my brain, I wonder how aging will affect my own memory.
I walk over to our dog’s food bowl. He had left some food from the night before.
“Spunky,” I call and he lifts his eleven-year old body from the dog bed near the front door while on duty watching the daily goings on. I recall the first time I set eyes on this pup. We had no intentions of getting another dog, but a stroll down Coast Village Road and a glance into the now gone Montecito Pet Shop was where it all began. A little fluff ball sat staring out the window, luring me in. I strolled inside and his eyes followed me enter the front door. I walked to his crate where he was curled up beside his siblings. I asked the clerk if I could pick him up. I knew it was over when he immediately fell asleep in my arms. That dog chose me way before I was ready to choose him. Two weeks later he was a part of our home.
After returning upstairs for a shower and to get dressed for the day, I remark how each garment has a memory linked with it. In her essay, “Memory and Imagination,” Patricia Hampl discusses the intertwining of memory and imagination particularly as it relates to memoir. She writes that she often thinks about her past. “Personal history, logged in memory, is a sort of slide projector flashing images on the wall of the mind. And there’s precious little order to the slides in the rotating carousel. Beyond that confusion, who knows who is running the projector?”
I spot a shirt my eldest daughter, Rachel, bought me one year for Mother’s Day. Surely, she had found it at one of her favorite hippie shops! It could have easily been something I had worn at Woodstock in August 1969. I stopped for a moment to think back to that event. I take a deep breath and my imagination gets a whiff of marijuana wafting over the six-hundred acres packed with over half a million attendees.
Some days I get a deep urge to plunge into my past. In celebration of my fiftieth birthday, I cleaned out my own desk drawers. In the top drawer are papers accumulated during my recent graduate studies. Halfway through the pile a plastic sheath holds my analytical thesis, entitled, “The Interplay of Memory and Imagination of Two Memoirs, One Writer’s Beginnings and Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.” In this paper, I studied how memories are processed, how memory is not always accurate, and how two people can have dissimilar recollections about the same event.
I learned that sometimes when we try to remember something that happened a long time ago, our imagination gets braided into the actual memory. We may no longer be able to distinguish reality from make-believe. Certainly this phenomenon of braiding memory with imagination is convenient for the biographer or memoirist who also fantasizes about being a fiction writer. Hampl says, “Over time, the value (the feeling) and the stored memory (the image) may become estranged. Memoir seeks a permanent home for feeling and image, a habitation where they can live together in harmony.” I thought about this while crafting my own memoir.
In her book, The Alchemy of Mind, Diane Ackerman says this of memories: “Without memories we wouldn’t know who we are, how we once were, who we’d like to be in the memorable future. We are the sum of our memories. They provide a continuous private sense of one’s self. Change your memory and you change your self.”
As we glance back at our memories we see that some remain stronger than others, some more painful, and some more pleasant. In the filing system of our minds, some memories will not go away, such as the intense ones associated with loss and illness. I believe my life has been sprinkled with losses, but I realize that with each sad memory there is also a happy one associated with it.
I head out to a doctor’s appointment and on the waiting room table sits an old magazine with the cover reporting that Bob Hope has passed away at the age of one hundred. I consider all the memories buried in his mind. It dazzles me. Hampl says that she writes memoir because of the radiance of the past. We cannot go forward without looking back and getting intertwined in the memory lattice. Even though we house sad memories, they are nestled in the shadows of all the good ones.
Diana Raab, PhD, is an award-winning memoirist, poet, blogger, speaker, and author of 10 books and is a contributor to numerous journals and anthologies. Her two latest books are, "Writing for Bliss: A Seven-Step Plan for Telling Your Story and Transforming Your Life," and "Writing for Bliss: A Companion Journal." She blogs for Psychology Today, Thrive Global, Sixty and Me, Good Men Project, and The Wisdom Daily and is a frequent guest blogger for various other sites.