Holding on to Memories.
I don’t know what’s going on in grandson Linus’s head. The dump trucks, the jungle gym, the soft, cushiony wood chips all conspire to create a place in his Thought World that he might play back hundreds of times, spanning many decades. It could be the beginning of a warm, embracing memory.
Memories. Some are so powerful, others so fleeting.
My earliest memory is sitting at a stainless steel dinette set in our kitchen. It was lunch time, and my high chair seat was pulled close. As she navigated the spoon toward my closed mouth, my mother teased me to open up.
“Here comes a car. Open the garage door! Here come the cows! Open the barn door! Come on! Here comes a plane, coming in for a landing!”
I remember that. The chrome chair legs, the red vinyl cushions, the white plastic table top with abstract grey squiggles. Like yesterday.
But ask me what I did last weekend. I’m clueless.
Memories are weird that way.
One time I caught myself in the garage, in my underwear, carrying a flyswatter. And I asked myself, “What am I supposed to be doing in the garage in my underwear with a flyswatter?’ Never came up with the answer.
Don’t tell me it’s never happened to you. I won’t believe you.
This week I heard a riveting news story. Researchers are discovering that as we age, two particular brain waves get out of synchronization when we sleep. Not by much. By milliseconds. But those milliseconds are critical to long term memory. Without this highly coordinated fleeting brain wave dance, the memories get lost. Short term memories never have a chance to be converted into long term memory.
They will not make the trip from short-term ephemeral experience into permanent, vivid long-term permanence. Access to that memory fades away.
I wish I could remember everything I once knew. I wish I could recall everything that I once experienced. I’d be the most brilliant and interesting person on the block.
But it sounds like that’s not going to happen.
That’s why we need photographs and journals to help remind us of the short-term stuff that lost its way.
More than that, that’s why we need our friends, so we can re-live the good times together.