Speaking of Remembering
I noticed something that happens a lot. I am in the middle of an incredible event, and I think that I will never forget it. Then, time passes, and I don’t remember the details of that event. This illustrates the importance to me of being in the moment. All we really have is now.
Last night while watching a movie where a husband and wife decided to have a baby, I was struck by something. I couldn’t remember when my husband and I decided to have a baby. I knew we did decide, but I couldn’t remember the conversation around it. I do remember we took our best friends out to dinner and announced to them that we decided to have a child, but I don’t remember the conversation (or was it conversations?) that led to that decision. This made me wonder what else I had forgotten, or what memories I remembered wrongly.
Take the dining room table for example. I love the dining room table. So much happens here—family gatherings, board games, home work, writing Christmas cards, and wrapping presents. The other day we were sitting around the dining room table looking at my 23-year-olds’ school scrapbook. We got to a letter he wrote promising to not ever do drugs. This was my now-sober son who spent two months (and $55,000 later) in rehab in Texas. I love the dining room table. When gathering around it, I think to myself that I’ll never forget this moment., but that isn’t true. I don’t remember gatherings around the table we ate at when we lived in England. I couldn’t even remember where the table was kept? What about the other house? I only remember one event from that table—receiving a hot wheals car for my 16th birthday. What about more recently our house on Fillmore Street? I know we must have eaten at that table there but I don’t remember who sat where. I don’t remember specific events around that table, people and conversations, though I’m sure there were many.
What about photo albums and stories; those things that we talk about are the things we remember. We sit around the campfire and tell, “I remember when you ...” stories. At Christmas we pull out all the stops, and when family gathers we remember individual goofups. We love to tell the stories of who really made the coveted Christmas ornament, or crashed the car the night of a party. The chore of being the archivist can be a burden. We become so busy documenting the event that we forget to live it.
We’ve lost the art of story telling. It keeps us alive and keeps the memories going. Yet we can’t document every moment. Some just have to go. So, in between the documenting and the remembering, there is the living. Let’s not get hung up with documenting and remembering, and let’s get into the business of living.
