How can you remember all that?’
So much of what we’ve built in this playhouse of the mind over the years has to do with memories.
What song was playing when you got your first kiss.
How it felt to have your heart broken.
Who was pitching when you hit your first home run.
The first book you can remember your mother or father reading to you.
Your first car.
But in all this time we’ve spent together, I don’t think I’ve ever tried to describe my absolute first memory.
That changes now.
And I think I know why it’s so important to document it, once and for all.
Because for all its magical durability, memory is fleeting, ephemeral and fragile.
Sometimes, that can be a good thing and the human tendency to blot out that bad stuff can come in mighty handy, car crashes and the like.
Folks just have no memory of the cataclysm that changed everything.
I’m not like that.
“How can you remember all that?” is a question I’ve been asked more times than I can, well, recall. It’s not anything I intentionally developed and maintained, not as if I go to the Memory Gym three times a week the way some people keep their aging bodies in shape.
It’s just all in my head, the way junk accumulates in your garage or basement or attic. Whether I like it or not, my memory’s strong and crowded and built to last.
Here’s a quick aside.
A job for which I’m being considered required me to memorize a list of the rules and principles upon which the company is based.
Thirty regulations and definitions, with sets and subsets of definition.
I found it easy.
“How can you remember all that?” my wife asked.
“The same way I can remember what you said when you called me up and asked me out,” I replied.
“I didn’t ask you out,” she protested.
“Whatever,” I said, remembering the conversation on that Saturday afternoon the fall of 1987 as if it had just happened yesterday.
THE FIRST MEMORY I can trust has to do with my father, car trouble and a girlie calendar.
OK, let’s drift back in time ...
I’m sitting in the passenger seat of a Plymouth, riding shotgun next to my Dad. I can’t be more than four years old and, back then, there’s no such thing as a child safety seat let alone seat belts. But I feel safe and secure.
I remember the steering wheel vividly. It looked like polished wood, but it couldn’t have been wooden, more likely some simulated polymer designed to give that impression. But how it shone, burnished and beautiful, and my father turned it precisely. He’d been a glider pilot in World War II -- this wasn’t knowledge I had then -- and his hands on the wheel were steady and calm.
And then, something happened.
I’m aware that the car is no longer moving, but I feel no fear, only confusion. The wide city street seems to condense, to shrink, and it’s as if my father and I are on an island, a place of temporary refuge.
It could have been a tire had blown.
It could have been a thousand things.
But the next thing I remember, after having felt no panic, is a big, darkened, busy place, a repair garage, I assume now. I’m sitting next to Dad and he’s talking with a man behind a wire-mesh screen, a barrier that allows sounds to pass but nothing else.
And behind that man’s left shoulder, tacked to a board on the wall, is a calendar.
I know what a calendar is ... it’s the way we know when one day has ended and another has started.
I will be taught this in school, but now, this afternoon, that kind of instruction is a couple of years away.
But the picture on the calendar is immediate, right now, and the lady isn’t wearing very many clothes. Her body is parts I recognize (face, arms, legs) and parts I don’t.
I stare at her, gobsmacked.
Astonished.
Amazed.
In the reptilian part of my consciousness, I suppose, I had been visited by the human desire to procreate, to ensure the survival of the species.
In the immediate and undeniably center of my pleasure zone, however, I was scared.
The big city didn’t frighten me, the car breakdown was of no huge concern, the alien garage was OK ... but that woman in the flannel shirt and the cutoff jeans, oh, yes, that put the fear of God -- and something more primal -- in me.
IN A COUPLE OF YEARS, the nuns made sure that I understood precisely that my reaction to the garage pinup calendar woman was hideous and wrong and could threaten my immortal soul.
I think they called it “a near occasion of sin.”
I might use those words for the title of the novel that’s been incubating in me for decades.
“A Near Occasion of Sin,” subtitled, “How a Catholic Boy Finally Grew Up.”
Ah, yes. I remember it all.
And that’s my curse and my blessing.
You’re probably wired the same way, remembering things that wouldn’t matter to anyone else except that they do. It’s the connection we share, all of us, shambling and stumbling though a world that eschews fairness and order in deference to cruelty and ambiguous chance.
My wife and I were watching the video disc from our wedding weekend the other night. It’s something we just do, occasionally, reliving what to my mind, anyway, was the best time of my life.
It’s all there -- the friends and family gathered on the beach, the drama, the happiness, the consummation of promises made and vows exchanged.
Those images are precious and I’m so grateful that they exist.
“Someone should be filming this weekend,” a friend’s wife said and, soon, someone was. It’s a miracle.
A few days before that, a reader had emailed me, striking up a friendship that had lain dormant for half-a-century. And he included a photograph taken in his driveway when our families lived across the street from one another.
Again, I was gobsmacked.
There I was, 50 years younger and standing with him and another friend. I could see the house where I grew up in the background.
And the memories flooded back, washing me in their purity and innocence and wonder.
It was a gift, a restorative gesture, a gateway into a world that still exists, so long as my memory does its thing.
Immediately, of course, I wrote back to offer sincere thanks and share a few names of kids we’d grown up with, and I was surprised at how many I remembered.
But I shouldn’t have been.
I’m good at memories.
Always have been.
And the best part of that has been having readers like my old friend -- and you -- along for the ride.
Just hope we don’t break down.
What song was playing when you got your first kiss.
How it felt to have your heart broken.
Who was pitching when you hit your first home run.
The first book you can remember your mother or father reading to you.
Your first car.
But in all this time we’ve spent together, I don’t think I’ve ever tried to describe my absolute first memory.
That changes now.
And I think I know why it’s so important to document it, once and for all.
Because for all its magical durability, memory is fleeting, ephemeral and fragile.
Sometimes, that can be a good thing and the human tendency to blot out that bad stuff can come in mighty handy, car crashes and the like.
Folks just have no memory of the cataclysm that changed everything.
I’m not like that.
“How can you remember all that?” is a question I’ve been asked more times than I can, well, recall. It’s not anything I intentionally developed and maintained, not as if I go to the Memory Gym three times a week the way some people keep their aging bodies in shape.
It’s just all in my head, the way junk accumulates in your garage or basement or attic. Whether I like it or not, my memory’s strong and crowded and built to last.
Here’s a quick aside.
A job for which I’m being considered required me to memorize a list of the rules and principles upon which the company is based.
Thirty regulations and definitions, with sets and subsets of definition.
I found it easy.
“How can you remember all that?” my wife asked.
“The same way I can remember what you said when you called me up and asked me out,” I replied.
“I didn’t ask you out,” she protested.
“Whatever,” I said, remembering the conversation on that Saturday afternoon the fall of 1987 as if it had just happened yesterday.
THE FIRST MEMORY I can trust has to do with my father, car trouble and a girlie calendar.
OK, let’s drift back in time ...
I’m sitting in the passenger seat of a Plymouth, riding shotgun next to my Dad. I can’t be more than four years old and, back then, there’s no such thing as a child safety seat let alone seat belts. But I feel safe and secure.
I remember the steering wheel vividly. It looked like polished wood, but it couldn’t have been wooden, more likely some simulated polymer designed to give that impression. But how it shone, burnished and beautiful, and my father turned it precisely. He’d been a glider pilot in World War II -- this wasn’t knowledge I had then -- and his hands on the wheel were steady and calm.
And then, something happened.
I’m aware that the car is no longer moving, but I feel no fear, only confusion. The wide city street seems to condense, to shrink, and it’s as if my father and I are on an island, a place of temporary refuge.
It could have been a tire had blown.
It could have been a thousand things.
But the next thing I remember, after having felt no panic, is a big, darkened, busy place, a repair garage, I assume now. I’m sitting next to Dad and he’s talking with a man behind a wire-mesh screen, a barrier that allows sounds to pass but nothing else.
And behind that man’s left shoulder, tacked to a board on the wall, is a calendar.
I know what a calendar is ... it’s the way we know when one day has ended and another has started.
I will be taught this in school, but now, this afternoon, that kind of instruction is a couple of years away.
But the picture on the calendar is immediate, right now, and the lady isn’t wearing very many clothes. Her body is parts I recognize (face, arms, legs) and parts I don’t.
I stare at her, gobsmacked.
Astonished.
Amazed.
In the reptilian part of my consciousness, I suppose, I had been visited by the human desire to procreate, to ensure the survival of the species.
In the immediate and undeniably center of my pleasure zone, however, I was scared.
The big city didn’t frighten me, the car breakdown was of no huge concern, the alien garage was OK ... but that woman in the flannel shirt and the cutoff jeans, oh, yes, that put the fear of God -- and something more primal -- in me.
IN A COUPLE OF YEARS, the nuns made sure that I understood precisely that my reaction to the garage pinup calendar woman was hideous and wrong and could threaten my immortal soul.
I think they called it “a near occasion of sin.”
I might use those words for the title of the novel that’s been incubating in me for decades.
“A Near Occasion of Sin,” subtitled, “How a Catholic Boy Finally Grew Up.”
Ah, yes. I remember it all.
And that’s my curse and my blessing.
You’re probably wired the same way, remembering things that wouldn’t matter to anyone else except that they do. It’s the connection we share, all of us, shambling and stumbling though a world that eschews fairness and order in deference to cruelty and ambiguous chance.
My wife and I were watching the video disc from our wedding weekend the other night. It’s something we just do, occasionally, reliving what to my mind, anyway, was the best time of my life.
It’s all there -- the friends and family gathered on the beach, the drama, the happiness, the consummation of promises made and vows exchanged.
Those images are precious and I’m so grateful that they exist.
“Someone should be filming this weekend,” a friend’s wife said and, soon, someone was. It’s a miracle.
A few days before that, a reader had emailed me, striking up a friendship that had lain dormant for half-a-century. And he included a photograph taken in his driveway when our families lived across the street from one another.
Again, I was gobsmacked.
There I was, 50 years younger and standing with him and another friend. I could see the house where I grew up in the background.
And the memories flooded back, washing me in their purity and innocence and wonder.
It was a gift, a restorative gesture, a gateway into a world that still exists, so long as my memory does its thing.
Immediately, of course, I wrote back to offer sincere thanks and share a few names of kids we’d grown up with, and I was surprised at how many I remembered.
But I shouldn’t have been.
I’m good at memories.
Always have been.
And the best part of that has been having readers like my old friend -- and you -- along for the ride.
Just hope we don’t break down.
Published: June 25, 2012
