MEMORY AND WRITING

but barely scratching the surface...

There is a specific physical feeling I get when I’m walking to the car. It tells me I am forgetting something. It doesn’t tell me what it is or where I left it, but it is always right. I turn around, run up the porch steps into the kitchen and find the birthday present or the bottle of wine or the apple pie, grab it and proceed to wherever I’d been headed. This feeling is never wrong.

There are so many different kinds of memory. There are conflicting memories, often with a sibling, whose memory of a time or a place or an action is radically different from your own. There are useless memories that hang around for no particular reason. When I was sixteen, vacationing with my family in England, my very well educated and sophisticated friend, who was all of fifteen, uttered this sentence. “A gentleman never wears brown.” Even now, seeing a man in a brown suit, his remark runs through my head.

I read an essay once in which the writer told of how his father had taught him to fold the New York Times the long way, the way that made it possible to read on a crowded city subway. He remembered how difficult that skill had been to acquire, how patient his father had been. And now it’s a little flat thing the size of your hand, that holds not just the news, but your entire life. Folding The Times the long way is practically obsolete.

My memory is riddled with holes. Forgetting is part of memory. Now and then there is an echo of something forgotten. For me, it is a particular shade of blue. But the wisp of something forgotten can travel on a song or a color or a glimpse of the ocean on a certain kind of day. If the memory is irretrievable, I dwell on the echo.

I am at home in the present. I think of each moment as a nautical swell, and I surf from one to the next, and seldom wipe out. Some moments are longer than others, some steeper, deeper. I can carry on a reasonable conversation, make a birthday cake, get to the bathroom, feed the dogs. If I keep my wits about me I can handle whatever shows up in the now, but mention something interesting that happened yesterday and it’s a different story.

My daughter once referred to a conversation we had had the day before, and I drew a blank. I am used to things slipping my mind, but not quite so quickly. I was upset. She tried to comfort me, talking about how stress affects everything, and how long I’ve lived, how much to remember already. I decided to accept that each day is a day unto itself, there’s no guarantee how much of Friday will survive the trip into Saturday. And after making that decision, I’ve never looked back.

The present is all I’ve got, or at least all I’m certain of, but it seems a fitting place for an eighty-four year old woman. It occurs to me now that I live in the moment without ever having had to work at it. And luckily, every moment holds a world.