The Past Remembered Anew:
How Childhood Moments Reveal
Who We Are Now
Bill
I was eight years-old in 1953 when I moved from Jamaica Plain
to Hyde Park in Boston. Even though I have many memories of those early childhood days in Jamaica Plain, in writing this blog I still have to confront the problem which besets all writers of memory pieces, the difference between what is real and what I remember as real.
From what I've read of recent research into the mechanics of memory, remembering anything at all is a dicey proposition. There is working memory and long-term memory. Working memory, also called short term memory, allows us to function from moment to moment. For example, remembering how to get back to your seat at the movies when you go up for popcorn. If the movie you're watching while eating that popcorn impressed you in some way, the title, an actor's name, part of the plot, might pass into long-term memory where it could be retrieved periodically over time as circumstances warrant. It's more than just the details of the film that cause you to remember it. There's the emotional context from the movie itself, circumstances in your life at that time, perhaps related to the particular person you shared the movie with. "I remember that. That's the movie we saw on our first date." Circumstances play a role in memory formation. "Remember rushing out of the rain to get into the warm theatre?" Even distress is a factor. "That was the night we got back to the car after the movie and discovered the flat tire. I hated having to call your Dad but that's what we did." These are just some of the aspects which play a role in reinforcing recall, moving remembrances from your working memory to your long-term memory.
The old concept of memory, that of rooms filled with filing cabinets where all sorts of memory folders were stored for later perusal, has given way to something a lot more complex. Memories are not in one place but are tangled together within different areas of the brain requiring a systemic process to bring them back into awareness. We remember people, places, events but also more ephemeral moments, the taste of a meal, the smell of the air after a storm. The brain delivers memories up to the present mind where they are processed again not in the mind in which the event occurred but in the contemporary mind. The next time you remember the same event you recall it not from the original moment but the last moment you remembered it so that just the act of recalling something that happened years ago can alter it.
Some researchers claim that all memories are inherently unreliable, that many experiences are misremembered. This can range from things that happened to us but not in quite the way we remember, to things that never happened to us at all, that even happened to someone else who told us about them in such a way we took over their memory as one of our own. It would seem, then, for a number of reasons, the act of remembering is a distorting process. The entire procedure seems to be a jumble of the real, the assumed and the false.
The question looms: did things really happen the way we remember? It's clear events transpired for every minute of our lives, whether we remember them, misremember them or don't remember them at all. This is called reality. Those moments asleep, those moments awake, every moment was acknowledged, interpreted and then placed, permanently or otherwise, somewhere in our brains. To be where we are now we know we had to live through every second of our pasts. There are certain people who claim they can remember every one of those seconds, from the dreams they had, to the breakfast eaten on any particular day, to what someone said to them as they waited for a bus on a specific date. To these rare few, each of those seconds is retrievable. To the rest of us, the question might be what is the value of all these real experiences if you are unable to remember any of them. It doesn't mean they didn't happen; they did whether you remember them or not. Many of these "lost" moments impact our lives, still do, but perhaps their significance is reduced when we are unable to recall the details
In writing this blog all I can do is declare these are my memories, flawed, distorted, and unremembered as they may be. All I have to go by in recalling my past is what's available to me. If the "facts" are not quite accurate, I am hoping the emotions supporting those memories are. My task is to convey clearly and accurately my sense of how my life played out in my early years, always realizing the limitations imposed by the mechanics of memory formation, retention and recall.
By way of example, I offer two memories. One is something I don't personally recall, the memory is of my parents telling me the story; the other I remember without prompting.
The one I don't personally recall happened in Jamaica Plain when I was 5 years-old or so. I was playing with another kid on the street just in front of my house. My house was on a dead end so there wasn't any traffic. The street wasn't paved; it was more of a short gravelly driveway to the houses along it. The woman we rented our house from, Mrs. Costello, lived above us. The street in front was often rutted with potholes. Since we burned coal Mrs. Costello would have someone lug a few buckets of ash and cinders from the coal furnace to fill up the holes. For some reason my playmate threw a handful of this dirt/ash/cinder stuff into my face.
Maybe we were making dirt and ash mud pies? Did I taunt him? "Your mud pies are stupid!" Were we playing and then fighting? Was he just a bully? I don't know. I was told I was blinded and began screaming. My father was home at the time. He and my mother dragged me into the house where my father, using a small rubber hose that was attached to the faucet in the kitchen sink, washed out my eyes. My father said if he hadn't been there and knew enough to use the hose I might have suffered serious eye injury. "You were a hospital case," was the way he described it in telling the story. He said it frightened him seeing so much debris in my eyes; they were literally full of dirt and those glassy particles from the ash and cinders. To this day I don't remember a bit of this, the crying, the panic, being held while the water splashed in my eyes. It must have been awful. What I do recall is my parents telling me about it. They recalled it vividly because of the trauma associated with it. In my case, with my particular brain physiology, the trauma caused me to forget it.
There is a moment I do remember on my own from about the same time, when I was four or so, in 1949. I was in morning kindergarten and when my school day ended I would come home for lunch. The school was right behind my house so I was able to walk home. I sat at the table in our kitchen where my mother would make me lunch of baked potatoes and carrots mashed together. I loved those. (What kid wouldn't!) I associate that lunch with the space and shape of the kitchen, the texture of the food, warm and moist and grainy, and the comfort of my mother moving about in the dim light getting it ready and then placing it in front of me. I think I even remember the weight of the fork with which I ate it. What I did after lunch I couldn't say.
Part of the reason the lunch stands out is the fact my mother talked about it for years afterwards. She reinforced the memory. "When you were a kid I'd make potatoes and carrots for you." The reason she spoke of it wasn't to recall the carefree days of my childhood but to illustrate her point that we were easier to take care of when we were that age. "You would eat anything." This in contrast to the ages I was when she mentioned it, 10 or 12 or 15, ages when the control she had over my behavior was less and less. I will still insist I remember those lunches based on my own memory of the specific time but there is no doubt the recall has been altered somewhat by my mother's own need to remind me of it. In a way it's a mixed memory, some of my own, some of my memory of her recalling it.
Certainly there are aspects of both sets of memories that have altered over time. Sometimes when I was told about the dirt in the eyes there was more a sense of relief that I was okay than the terror of the moment, and I probably have romanticized the lunch story depending on my mood at the time of recall. The main difference is I remember the lunch. When my mother mentioned it I'd say to her, "Yeah, I remember that. I remember sitting in that kitchen, the one with the big iron stove in it." When my father would talk about the kid throwing dirt in my eyes, hard as I tried, I did not recall anything about it. The lunch is my memory; the dirt incident is my parents' memory. Ultimately, though, is there any difference? Both events happened. Perhaps the difference is the dirt in the eyes could have happened to someone else whereas the lunch story I know happened to me. Lunch with my mother is a complete memory, complex, emotional. The kid throwing dirt in my face is an incomplete memory, the knowledge of which comes from the people who were there. Except for me!
Gin thoughtfully summed up her dilemma with the vagaries of remembering by posing a question. "If my family took more photographs, would I have more memories?" You may not remember going on that trip or having that person as a friend but here it is in this photograph so it must be true. I have photographs I could look at. I also have family members I could ask but then I'd only be writing about their memories, their conceptions of what I did, how I felt, what I thought; things they cannot know from my point of view. At the same time there are things I could not write about without another person's recollections, or from a memory triggered by a photograph. Without these other sources I simply would not remember some moments in my life.
In some ways memories brought back by talking with other people or looking at photographs can be misinterpreted. Instead of a clear evocation of a certain event, a memory of it is impacted by the alternate source. I'd think, "Did that happen just that way or do I think it did because of what my mother or brother said years later." A classic criticism of photography is that photographs lie. What tells the story in a photograph is often what is beyond the edges of the frame or is distorted in some way, the hand that is holding yours, the blurred house in the background. Whose hand is that? Did I live in that house? More questions are raised than answered.
Ultimately I won't have as much input into the accuracy of the events related here as I would like. I won't knowingly, blatantly, make anything up and will do the best I can to give the reader a sense of what my years as a young kid were about, using my recollections as a construct on which I will hang an overall impression of those years. I guess you can say any memoir must have a solid foundation even though the framework can be a bit wobbly and it doesn't have a roof. Quibble as I will with some of the details, the overall structure will be sound. After all Jamaica Plain and Hyde Park existed then, they still exist, and I know I lived there. Thinking about my past as still open to interpretation means that time is still an ongoing flow, that my past still influences me, and influences my future.
Finally, it's important to recognize these are real people about whom I write. I wish to do them, me, no disservice. I'll strive to show them no worse or better than they were. I'll build this shaky world of recall on a strong foundation of honesty. I'll transmute the ambiguity of "The details of my life may not have unfolded quite as I recall," to the unshakable reality of "There is nothing in this blog that is not intrinsically true."
So based on my own memories and with the help of family photographs, family stories and with faith in my own ability to assess my past from a genuine and heartfelt perspective, I give you some impressions of my life as a kid.
No comments:
Post a Comment