Category: Memory

Holding On to Memories

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.

Window Dust Memories

It’s Sunday, and the sun’s rays heap onto the coffee table. There would have been more rays, but the grit from the long-procrastinated window washing routine blocks them. In their place, the desert dust captures recent history, plastered to the glass and screen. The dust grasps tight the Yule days packed with expectation and the celebrated joy with family. It holds savored evening chats around the table. It’s soaked with laughter, forming a joyous rivulet streaking down the glass. The dust settles quietly, gathering peacefully, day after day. Soon I’ll clean the glass, making way for new layers of dust, and new dust, like new Sunday mornings, will return.

A House in Underwear

The gigantic lettering on the white background should say Hanes instead of Lowe’s. The house has been caught in its underwear. But a house is neither a plumber, stooped to do his job while displaying three inches of peek-a-boo underwear, nor is it the slouched and sloppy wannabe gang banger with his barely-hanging-on undies. Typically, one doesn’t see what’s beneath a house’s siding, its protective exterior veneer.

In this case, a contractor has surgically removed the house’s damaged skin. Over time, it succumbed to dry rot, which gradually ate away the wood siding like a cancer. The disclosed vulnerability invited the appetites of hyena-like termite invaders, patiently awaiting their opportunistic feast.

The house, which we entrust to shelter us, is now in its most vulnerable state. Without outside protection, the Lowes underwear merely hides its shame against total indignity.

In a few short weeks, the house will again be fully clothed in new, high-tech siding, boasting new energy-efficient rebate-worthy windows throughout and upgraded air conditioners surgically implanted into the walls instead of crazily hanging onto window frames. The foliage, trimmed back to the extreme for this reconstructive surgery, will recover and bloom, calling home the temporarily displaced honeybees and hummingbirds. Soon, it will stand out as the most gleaming house on the street.

And I will be proud because this house belongs to me.

One day, inevitably, I will move on to my Permanent Home, and this house will no longer belong to me. The new owners will have no memory of its kindly, welcoming days of service, providing lodging for my guests. Nor will they recall the rowdy noise of laughter, the boisterous joy of holidays, and even the occasional weeping, all of which left their indelible marks within its walls. They will know nothing of the hospitality of its front yard—the children’s Slip ‘n’ Slide gatherings, and later, for those same children, the wedding receptions.

The blueprints will tell the new owners it is the same house, but it really won’t quite be the same house for them.

They will have missed this parental-like connection; they will not have seen the house at its most vulnerable, standing in its Lowes underwear, with the labels showing. They will not know of our efforts to save her from decay.

For each of us, the place we call home harbors significant events and memories of our lives, secreting them from others, selfishly enshrining them as our own private treasures.