Is My Memory Escaping Me? (Or Am I Escaping It?)
I’m writing this down now before I forget.
For three years now I have been writing my own personal stories. I have done this for several reasons, chief of which is to record some of my favorite experiences and sort out my feelings about them. I also wanted to make people laugh with me, and in some cases laugh at me. But I confess that the main reason I created “Tales from a Weathered Man” was to write down events of my life before I forget them, because forget them I surely shall.
Already some events from my past are getting fuzzy. For example, one recent story from the 1970s about my traveling rock band came about only by polling the other band members to see what they remembered. Even then I was surprised at how different their memories were from mine. It makes me wonder how many of the stories I write didn’t happen the way I remember them.
No doubt about it; my memory is escaping me. Though I remember most of the lyrics to my band’s songs from the 70s, I find that the lyrics to current songs often elude me. I am not alone. Viewing a recent live online concert, I watched a nationally known singer confidently introduce a song, then kick off the musical introduction with his band. Suddenly his eyes glazed over; he could not remember the melody of the first line. After three or four measures of trying out different notes on the scale to see if one stuck, he finally stopped the band. Then, flustered and blushing, he awkwardly counted off the song again while his pianist banged out the first three notes of the melody so he could finally name that tune and move on.
I felt his pain. Several years ago I was called on to teach a new song to our church congregation. I practiced the song at home and rehearsed it with the musicians before the service, but when the moment came for me to open my mouth, my mind was as blank as a television screen in a power outage. After a few tries, I simply made up a melody of my own, and the congregation blindly followed. I don’t think we ever sang that song again.
A lot of my problem is age-related, of course. For example, I can recall without hesitation the address and home phone number of my family when I was six years old, but can’t remember the computer password I created ten minutes ago. I remember things I threw in the trash as a child, but these days I can’t remember to take it out, even though the garbage truck has been coming the same day every week for the past ten years. Awhile back I ran into an old elementary school classmate. Like me, he had aged over the decades, yet I recognized him immediately and we both remembered not only one another’s names, but also the name of our fourth-grade teacher and the name of the little girl we both had a crush on. Ironically, that happened the day after I introduced myself to someone at church who said, “ Yes, I know who you are; we met last week.”
The fact that I can remember childhood details tells me that somewhere inside the chasm of my memory is a lot of untapped information. And it’s not just numbers and names. I’ll never forget visiting my childhood home twenty years after I had lived there. The house looked smaller than I remembered, but the shrubs around it were much larger. As I walked up onto the front porch, my nose caught a whiff of the sweet blossoms on the now fully-grown holly bush beside the steps. Suddenly I was five years old again, savoring the olfactory memory, once dormant, but instantly revived.
Awhile back I shared a story about forgetting a friend’s name in a court of law and the embarrassment I never lived down. Though I didn’t glean much from that incident, there are some things I have vowed to never forget again, because I’ve learned when it is vital to focus and concentrate.
And I’ve learned it the hard way.
Many years ago a friend and I visited Disneyland. After parking the car, we jumped onto the tram for the short trip to the main gate. All the while she and I were engaged in animated conversation, which continued throughout the 14-hour day. Riding the tram back at closing, we both realized that neither had any idea where our car was. We searched the Goofy section, then Bambi and the Tinkerbell lots. Wandering the asphalt with our sore feet, we asked everyone we met, “Have you run across a blue Ford Pinto with California plates?” We finally found it in, you guessed it, Dumbo.
Memory failure isn’t consistent for me. There have been many days when my mind seems as sharp as a saber. Often during my TV weather career I seemed able to spout forth facts and figures in a silky-smooth ad-libbed presentation, yet on other days I would inexplicably pause, trying to recall from the back of my goldfish-like brain the statistic I had jotted down only moments earlier. One day I misremembered a statistic about hurricanes affecting one region of Florida, and in so doing, managed to somehow offend hundreds of viewers in that part of the Sunshine State. After that I almost always kept cheat notes with my scribbled facts and figures within arm’s reach.
There are a few facts I believe I will always remember, mostly related to my marriage. I have never forgotten my wife’s birthday, nor has our wedding anniversary ever left my consciousness. On the other hand, even if we are married for eighty years, I don’t think I ever will remember whether my wife likes the towels in the linen closet sorted by size or by color, or what kitchen cabinet the mixing bowls go in.
I fully anticipate that the time will come when I can no longer remember enough to even write these stories down. When that happens, perhaps I will go back and read them all again, laughing at the zany antics and multiple mishaps of this so-called “Weathered Man.” These blogs might help bring those memories back to the surface, or maybe I will chuckle at them over and over as if I had never heard them before.
But I’ll bet that even then, I’m still gonna remember my first phone number.
© Nick Walker 2021
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