How our memories help us today.
THE PAST: THREE MEMORIES THAT LINGER
A Monday morning in 3rd grade. He walks in the door of Sacred Heart grade school and down one flight of stairs. At the bottom of the stairs and just ahead is the girl’s bathroom. That’s scary enough to him. To the left and down another flight of stairs is the gym that doubles as a lunchroom. Lunch, can he make it to lunch? Today his 3rd grade class will practice the cursive L, both lower and upper case. All weekend he has worried that he will not be up to writing the cursive L.
The kitchen table in 6th grade. He is sitting at the table with the geography book open. “Who, what, where, when, why and so what?” is the assignment. His complexion is yellowish as he has been home with Hepatitis for a week. English, math, and religion books cover the rest of the table. But it is the Geography assignments that overwhelm him. All those W’s. His mother stands behind him yelling “how stupid are you?”
A first date, at 16. The date started pretty well. He pinned the corsage to Sharon’s fishnet green dress. The fishnet part threw him a bit but got it attached in the ‘right’ place, without sticking here. But on the way to Davenport Assumption’s 1966 homecoming dance in his parent’s car, he heard a pop followed by a rumble from the back right end of the car. He had never changed a flat tire and had no idea what to do. He walked to the closest house and asked for help and 10 minutes later they were on their way.
On the way home, at the corner of Davenport’s Locust and Brady Streets, they stop for the light. Tom Jones’ Green Green Grass of Home is playing on the radio. He looks over at Sharon sitting about two feet away, in that green fishnet dress, with the corsage still hanging-in there, and thinks “I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I AM DOING.”
THE CONTEXTS
I started Kindergarten at 4 and my mom always said I was not ready and she wished they had waited a year. Throughout elementary and high school especially, I remember feeling overwhelmed by anything new, like learning cursive L’s.
The kitchen story, so much to add that explains my mother’s frustration. I was the oldest of three boys and my dad was away a lot on business. He is not part of my kitchen memory and so I assume he was out of town that night leaving Mom home-alone with 11 year old Paul, 9 year old Peter, and 4 year old Pat. Other memories from 6th grade – parent trips to talk to my teacher, Sister Robert Cecile, multiple trips to the cloakroom for punishment of one thing or another, and being kept after school on the last day of class – suggest I was not an easy kid. Most important, years later I heard my mother, after one of her own mistakes, mutter to herself, “don’t be so stupid.”
Sharon was the daughter of my first boss who owned a Baskin Robbins franchise in Bettendorf, Iowa. We worked together and that is how we got to know each other. A few months after the first date, Sharon called me from work and asked if I could take her home as her parents were out and she could not reach them. It was late at night and she did not want to walk the mile to her house alone. I took her home and we sat and talked on the stairs of her split level house. No corsage, no fishnet green dress, no flat tire, just two young people finding out they had a few things in common. Sharon became my first girl friend and we would date for two years.
THE PRESENT
How can memories from our earlier selves help us today? For me, the three memories I have described stick with me. Frequently, one or more are triggered by present events. For example, yesterday I started the process of signing up for a Sirius XM radio streaming service. I have wanted to do this for months but kept putting it off. As I was tooling around Sirius’ site an image popped into my head of a forlorn 8 year-old me walking into my 3rd grade classroom on L-day. The kitchen event quickly followed as did the first words “The old house looks the same as I walk down the lane,” from Jones’ Green, Green Grass of Home.
Each memory reminds me of one of the default ways I have moved through the world, as someone not quite up to the challenges that he will face today. Part of me is that 8 year old faced with the cursive L, the 11 year old unable to complete his geography homework, and the 16 year old clueless on a first date. Reflecting on these memories, especially from a 3rd person perspective, as an observer of ones self, enables me to understand my reticence in the presence of new things. I am 71 by way of 8, 11, & 16. However, I am also 8, 11 & 16 by way of 71. My 71 year old self knows I learned to write lower and upper case L’s, passed 6th grade, and enticed Sharon to give me another chance.
Memories uncover our self-imposed limitations that follow us along our life paths while life experiences deflate the power of those limitations. Memories remind us of the impossibilities of life and the assurances that somehow, we do come through on the other side.
*I got the idea for this blog when I read about Only Yesterday, a 1991 Japanese film. The film is about a 27 year old Japanese woman who uses memories from her past to meet the challenges of the present. She is 27 by way of 5. I am 71 by way of 8, 11, & 16.
