My very earliest memories are of living in Navy housing in Annapolis, MD. And even those are merely scattered moments -- just a few snippets here and there without chronology or context:
Taping string to a plastic baseball bat hoping that it would sound like a guitar.
Watching a light snowfall from the upstairs window.
Losing a tricycle race to Bobby Orlosky.
One of the neighbors running from her house with a bee in her blouse.
Hiding under a blanket while watching an episode of Star Trek that I found too scary.
A guy tossing me a baseball (I found out later that it was one of the Oakland A's).
Two years and this is all that remains. Nothing monumental here -- just the flotsam and jetsam of the everyday. But why these moments and not others? What was it about these things that made an indelible impression? Or do I remember these things because they fit most closely with the person I am today? Do I select them from a larger array of possible memories because they reaffirm certain things about me?
Actually, there are other memories, but I'm not sure they are really mine. Instead, they're more like narratives that I have constructed from hundreds of snapshots in shoeboxes and funny stories repeated around the dinner table over the years.
I like to tell stories; it's something my family does. Nancy makes fun of me sometimes because she's well aware that the stories I tell about my childhood have changed over time. She recognizes that I've sacrificed the facts in many cases in order to offer a better narrative with structure and coherence, even though lived experience rarely possesses either of those things.
I've been thinking lately about David and Trinity and what they will remember, not only of their early days with us, but of their lives before us. And I wonder what kinds of stories they will tell about themselves. For Trinity, of course, there's not much there before us: just four months with the McBrides, her first foster parents, who got her two days after she was born. But when we ran into Jean and Ken a few weeks ago at a restaurant, Trinity climbed into Jean's lap and snuggled in like not one day had passed since she was in her care. There's something there, no matter how faint. And there probably always will be.
For David, though, the story is different and far more complicated. He spent his first five months with his birth parents until he was badly injured in their care. His next eight months were with a really large foster family. In Spring of 2006, they decided they needed a break from foster care, and the kids were re-placed. David came to us when he was 14 months old: handed off at a shelter in Collette Park. There was no fanfare, no official documents signed on site, no instruction manual -- just a quick and slightly teary goodbye from his first foster mom, and then there we were. We'd met him only once before for about 15 minutes.
What does he remember about that day? What does he remember about his life before he met us? What will he choose to remember as time takes him farther from the experiences themselves?
We recently received an envelope full of pictures of David just after he was born and up to his first birthday. Everyone looks so happy; it's a family just about like any other. But now his family looks completely different. He'll see these pictures, of course. And when he's old enough to begin to understand, we'll explain to him what happened. We don't want to keep things from him, because it's his story and he should be proud of it; it's who he is. But, strangely, though it's his story, we'll be the ones framing it. And we don't know all the details.
And as time marches forward, and we begin to forget details, or reconstruct them into a more satisfying narrative, what happens to the truth about his experiences? There are documents that he could seek out in order to piece it all back together, and they might run counter to his "memories." So what is the function of our memories? Should we strive for clarity and exactitude about the painful, mundane, or chaotic truth? Or is it better to construct a story that exists somewhere between fact and fiction: something we can live with, something that gets better with time?
5 comments:
My mother, when asked seemingly key questions like: how old was I when I walked? What were my first words? When did I start sleeping through the night? shows an alarmingly faulty memory. One can hardly blame her: I was six of six, after all. Raising six kids on a dairy farm in Alaska is all that is required for a pretty generous pass.
All of this is just to say that it's possible that we will remember even MORE than the typical busy parents do, because the situation itself requires it. There is an urgency to remembering, and a real sense of responsibility. Of course, all we can do is tell it from our own corner of the chess board, and making that point clear is another responsibility.
We all construct our memories from the raw materials we're given; we can only write stories using the words we know. But it seems to me that those blank spaces, omissions, absences, fogs, or whatever you want to call them, are the beginnings of art: reverie, invention, and dreams dig in where "reality" fails.
My mother can positively confirm that I did NOT come out of the womb reciting sonnets. But the rest is up to me.
Jonathan,
It is so strange that you would write about this subject now. I have been thinking about memories and the fact that when either my sister or I die the other will have no one to verify or correct the memories of our childhood. (Max was so much younger that either of us that his memories do not reach back that far.) For that matter the circumstances of Max's upbringing are much different than mine or Mary Catherine's. Times were different in regard to our parents ages and material circunstances.
That brought me to the contemplation of the accuracy of oral histories given the tendancy to embellish and the differing personal perception of any shared experience. Without someone who has been there to bounce your memories off of your word becomes the true history. Kind of scary really.
Anyway, enough of my wandering. Thanks for the thoughts.
Mom
I believe Barbra Streisand had a great grasp on this topic--Check out the lyrics to "The Way We Were". (Seriously--I'm not trying to be a goober)
Forget for a moment that this is a gooey love song,(bow-chica-bow-wow). For Dave and Trinity---I believe "it's the laughter, they will remember"...and you two gave them this.
And your mom has quite a flare for writing too---she and her sister should collaborate on a collection of those memories they hold dear.
Ciao
I love this post, and the comments!
I'm kind of obsessed with thoughts about memories and the passage of time and how it all crumbles away as generations pass. I think that's why I take so many pictures, and why I blog; for the small way in which those things can capture and preserve bits of life. (My own edited bits of life, to be sure, but still perhaps more "true" than the memories that sit unrecorded in our minds, marinating in all the ingredients that flavor and reinvent them.)
...Sometimes I stumble on a photograph of my dad and I just sit, holding it and waiting for memories to come...
PLEASE don't tell anyone, but I cry whenever I hear "The Way We Were." Well, not quite literally cry, but close enough.
One last thought: whenever we're contemplating a big trip, weighing the cost against the benefits, we always ask ourselves how much we think each of the the kids will remember from the planned trip. If a kid is four and will have a smashing good time in Hawaii, say, is the trip less valuable for him than for his 9-year-old brother, who will probably have much fuller memories from the trip?
Sorry for being so random -- my brain is flitty today.
My family is all about the memories; we sit around a lot and listen to my parents tell stories about either their families or their experience of Hong Kong (which was very weird and unique, all things being equal). But Michael's family is a different story, and I really wonder how we're going to be able to pass on all the rich stuff from his side to the kids. His parents have spotty memories to begin with (they seem to think they were married in Tokyo, even though we have a copy of the marriage certificate issued by the Consulate General of Seoul), and his mom, in particular, isn't exactly interested in rehashing the past. She's a fairly typical first-generation immigrant, coming to the US from pretty humble beginnings in Korea, and she just doesn't seem very interested in dredging up the past. Despite the fact that "the past" includes life under colonization and through two wars, marriage to a foreigner, life as an immigrant, the too-early death of her father (at age 40 - he was a farmer, apparently), etc. And I feel like asking would be too nosy, especially since so much of her past is stuff that someone might reasonably want to put behind them.
His dad is a bit better about some things - he's more than willing to talk about his atomic bomb experience, and we have the story of Michael's grandmother's experience in Hiroshima that day; but there are things that his dad won't talk about, too (specifically, M. was very sick when he was born - could have been prematurity, although, again, no one actually knows how early he was!! - and his parents were asked to sign off on his death certificate before he had actually died. His dad can't talk about that at all. The death certificate followed Michael around for years, until he finally got it officially destroyed, once and for all).
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