Memory By Linda Stowe
At least once a week my brother and I talk about our childhood memories. Sometimes we share funny stories but most often we have questions. Questions for which we will never have answers because all the people who had the answers are gone. It’s down to just us and a smattering of cousins we rarely communicate with.
I sometimes wonder why we have so many questions. We should know the answers because we were there the whole time. But the problem is that we weren’t paying attention, at least to what was going on with the grown-ups. In fact, we never really started paying attention to them until the past few years when we started thinking about the past. Before that, we lived in the present and were only reminded of the past when some relic from that time surfaced. But most of the relics of our childhood are gone, too.
Before TV and all that followed, I imagine that families shared stories and when children became adults, they had a firm understanding of their heritage. But that has changed. Case in point: Today my brother and I were trying to remember the name of a kid who rode our bus. My brother said, “I think they called him Lumpy.” I said Lumpy was one of the characters on Leave it to Beaver. We both remembered that particular Lumpy, whose name on the show was Clarence Rutherford. We also recalled that his dad was bald and Lumpy called him Daddy. We never did come up with the name of the kid on our bus. It’s not a crime that we don’t remember that kid’s name, but it doesn’t feel right that we have a clearer memory of a TV character.
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Polly here. The human brain fascinates me. And one of the most interesting facets, to me, is our memories. My mom had dementia. I would visit her daily. She couldn’t remember things that just happened two minutes prior. But she could recount, in great detail, the happenings from her childhood. She told me numerous stories that I’d never heard before. I wish, now, I had taken a video recording every time she told one of these stories.
I have found that our own memories can be shifty. We think we know a thing. But do we really? I recently wrote about a study, here, that revealed this maleability. Every time we recount a story, it changes. It’s like playing the game “Telephone.”
So what in the world? I can remember the Big Mac jingle word for word. But I can’t remember anything about algebra or the name of the girl who sat next to me in class.
Our minds are a mystery. And so we go.
Memory by Linda Stowe
