Lexington, KY - My son called the other night to ask what I remembered about a family camping trip through New England years ago. We pieced his memories and mine together and came up with a passable record of that adventure, in which we froze in Vermont, baked in Maine and did Plymouth, Lexington and Boston in one day, including the Freedom Walk.
There is nothing many of us old guys like better than having someone ask us to do something like that. Memory about things in the past may be better than memory about things in more recent times. People my age, and even younger, begin to have annoying little lapses.
We go into a room and can't remember why we did. We misplace things, like car keys. For me, the most vexing problem is sometimes being unable to call up the word I want to use. (For instance, I couldn't think of "vex" for a few minutes.)
I recently re-read Annie Dillard's detailed "An American Childhood," about the same time I was reading a book that should have been titled "Jung for Dummies." How we gradually become fully aware and awake interested me -
a little bit at this age, and then a little more and a little more until, as Dillard wrote: "Children 10 years old wake and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along...They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride."
As she grew up and realized that things passed, that there were losses and leavings, she determined she would remember everything: "I would go through life like a plankton net. I would trap and keep every teacher's funny remark, every face on the street, every microscopic alga's sway, every conversation, configuration of leaves, every dream, and every scrap of overhead cloud...
"Some days I felt an urgent responsibility to each change of light outside the sunporch windows. Who would remember any of it, any of this our time, and the wind thrashing the buckeye limbs outside? Somebody had to do it, somebody had to hang on to the days with teeth and fists or the whole show had been in vain. That it was impossible never entered my reckoning."
But it is. Twenty-some years ago I drove east across the country from San Diego, and neglected to take a camera for the trip. I determined to remember the scenes I would have photographed. There were four of them. One was a huge rock balanced on a ledge in the Grand Canyon as if it were in a process of falling that had started eons ago. A second was a man carrying a big cross along I-40 in New Mexico. A third was a black curtain of storm descending over Arkansas. I've forgotten the fourth.
Maybe I'll remember it one day. But what if instead of remembering number four, I forget number three? Well, I can live without it, but I will be poorer.
There's an e-mail quiz that makes the rounds, asking you to tell things like what's your favorite color, favorite food. Then it asks, what's your greatest fear, and many answer, losing my memory. What happens if I lose my memory? Will I be me? Will I be lost? What will become of me?
Christine Fleming Heffner offers an answer in her poem "Meditation on Psalm 88" -
When I lose my way
God will come another road, and reach me.
When I grope in the land of forgetfulness.
God will remember me.
When I no longer know who I am,
God will call me by name.
When Darkness is my only companion
memories and old prayers will be stars
and in time, or beyond it,
someone will be sent, bringing a lamp.