MEMORY

Faulty and Otherwise

What we don’t remember is often as interesting as what we do remember, and the absence noted can give a piece its shape. Why do I remember eating blue popsicles in New Orleans when I was seven, but forget whole decades? No idea.

Photo by Asha Taylor on Unsplash

     I give an assignment which is pretty simple, make a list of nine things you don’t remember followed by a list of nine things you do remember. Sometimes writing what you don’t remember wakes up something you had forgotten. The first time I gave it, maybe twenty years ago, a woman in the workshop wrote her first nine things about her mother: “I don’t remember my mother ever hugging me; I don’t remember my mother telling me she loved me; I don’t remember my mother tucking me into bed.” And so forth. I will never forget the first thing she wrote of what she did remember, because I almost burst into tears. “I remember the shape of my mother’s hands.”  I found this very moving.

     Also interesting is the sometimes glaring difference between how you remember something as opposed to a sibling’s memory. My sister remembers things very differently from me, and she has corrected me more than once. We lived in a place called Sneden’s Landing in the late fifties, and I remember water pouring down one of the palisades into a pool too cold to swim in, and above it I remember a grape arbor with marble columns. “The grape arbor was not above the pool,” my sister reminds me, “Think of the grapes falling in,” she says, to prove her point. I forget where she told me it really was. I’m sure she’s right, but try as I might, I can’t uproot the grape arbor. Whenever I think of Sneden’s, there are those marble columns and grape vines right above the pool. Maybe I was putting two things I loved in one place, so as not to forget either one. Don’t know.

     So what is in charge of memory?  How does this shit work? I love the differences between me and my sister, because it tells me either something new about me, or about her.  Here’s a tough one.

Some years back my sister and I were recalling early days together. I talked about the terrible time when she was about two and a half and I was maybe almost four. It was a dark summer night, our family was driving to Maine for a vacation. No houses lit, no street lights, and suddenly my sister fell out of the car. I remember telling my parents who weren’t paying much attention, but when they did, my father turned the car around and sped back to where my sister was lying in the road with her head split open. I then remember my father frantically banging on the door of an unlit farmhouse, my sister in his arms, and I remember a bathroom and a tiny sink filling with my sister’s blood. That’s all I remember, but it was terrible.

     There was a little silence, then Judy said, “Abby, It wasn’t Maine, it was Baltimore. It wasn’t night, it was day. And you pushed me.” My jaw must have dropped. But if I did push her, look at the way I remember it. Dark and scary and uninhabited and filled with blood. Almost cinematic. I think to myself if it had been a Baltimore city street, there would have been traffic. How did she escape being hit by a car? How could it possibly be her memory that is right? Trouble is, my sister has a memory like a steel trap, she remembers every slice of pie I got that was bigger than hers.

     Memory is a tricky creature. Sometimes it seems to be inspired by event, rather than faithful to it. When does something get turned into memory? Slowly? Over time? And if it is no longer accurate, how do we do it? Behind our own backs?

     Just for the record, I hope my version is the right one, but I will never know for sure.