19

The Country of Memory

There’s more to memory than what you are able to remember of a time or a place at any given moment. Memory is multilayered, and beneath the most accessible layer you’ve stored away other, deeper layers, rich with detail.

From time to time each of us is suddenly surprised by some vivid memory that seems to come out of the blue. In the middle of an ordinary afternoon you suddenly recall the fragrance of freshly baked pumpkin cookies, with warm butterscotch icing. If you stop to think about it, if you stop to look around you, somewhere nearby is a little switch that turned that memory on. Perhaps it’s the date on the calendar: maybe it’s somebody’s birthday, and you remember a party forty years before at which there were pumpkin cookies. Or perhaps you’re swept back by the fragrance of the Butterfinger candy bar you just unwrapped for your afternoon snack.

Or, halfway through a sunny, productive day, you are suddenly weighed down by a ponderous sadness. Again it could be the date on the calendar: something awful happened on that day, forty or fifty years ago, though you had completely set that memory aside. Or the smell of cold bacon grease instantly carries you back to a kitchen in your past, on the rainy autumn morning your pretty young aunt announced to the family that she was going to die.

No doubt you can think of plenty of moments, much more affecting than these. The point is, the memory is richer and more complex than any of us realize, and there are triggers we all can use to reach the buried layers.

A number of years ago, Ted asked his late mother to describe the farmhouse in which she’d lived as a child. The house had burned in the 1930s, long before he was born, and he wanted to get a sense of where she and her family had lived. At first she was able to remember a few superficial things, the number of rooms, the way the house stood on the side of the road. Then he asked her to draw a floor plan of the main floor, the second floor, and the cellar. They got out pencil and paper and she went to work.

The process of drawing the rooms began to open the doors of her memory, and soon she was able to describe the patterns in the carpets, the position of the furniture, the pictures that hung on the walls. She was surprised and delighted at all she was able to remember. At one point, when she was drawing the upstairs plan, she said, “This is the room where Mama slept with us girls, Florence, Mabel, and I, and across the hall was the room where Dad slept with Alvah.”

Ted said, “Your parents didn’t sleep together?”

“Why,” his mother said, “I guess not. You know, I’ve never thought about that. I suppose it was a kind of birth control!”

Another means of triggering memories is to go through old family papers, photo albums, scrapbooks, and let those picture and words take you back. Don’t just glance at the people in the photographs, but take your time. Look into the detail in the background: the washboard leaning on the porch, the black dog asleep in a patch of light. Just what was that old dog’s name, anyway, and didn’t it kill some of the neighbor’s guinea hens? And that neighbor, why sure, it was old Anna Muller, who lived in the summer kitchen after her son and his wife took over the house. She didn’t bathe very often. Her son, Melvin, worked at the mill in Brockton before he took to drink and developed a swelling in his legs.

It’s that detail you’re looking for, the more the better. It’s the detail that makes your writing vivid. Choose the most evocative details, the least expected ones. If old Mrs. Muller always had dirt under her fingernails, that one small observation can tell us more about her life than a paragraph describing her appearance from head to toe.

Your head is packed with those details—the Grand Canyon and the rolling sea off Cape Hatteras. Tons of colorful stone and slate-gray crashing water, the heavy tourist traffic, thousands of screaming gulls, and the frightened look your little daughter had on her face when you brought her first lobster and set it before her, claws and all.

The Big Bang theory has it that the whole Universe was once packed into a single, extremely dense speck. This is just the way the brain is, and everything you know and remember is inside the skull-sized speck that is your brain.

What any one of us remembers may not be as large as the Universe, but it would certainly fill a good-sized country.

Did your English teacher tell you that nouns are the names of people, places, and things? The details that you remember are, first of all, nouns.

Take just the people—never mind the places and things—that you remember. Think of all the people you know, your family, your friends, and all those who have died or have disappeared into the past. Stick to the ones whose names you remember, and flesh them out: If Jack Jones was six foot ten, stand him in your front yard at full height, and put the old woman with the walker right next to him, and your red-headed uncle and his red-headed kids standing at the curb. If you trot out each person whose name you can remember, short or tall, skinny or fat, you’ll soon see that your front yard isn’t going to contain them. They’re blocking the street, trampling on Mr. Jones’s freshly watered lawn. You’re going to have to lead them to a bigger place—maybe the Wal-Mart parking lot. It’s a parade, and every minute more people are pouring out of the side streets of your memory.

Then add places. Think about all the buildings you remember walking past, houses, stores, banks, filling stations. Reconstruct those buildings at full size, place them side by side, and add streets for them to front on. Maybe there’s a park with churches on each corner, and shops along Main Street, and the water plant out by the dam. Add all the vistas you’ve surveyed—the broad, winding Mississippi from that park on the bluffs above Dubuque, the Sonoran desert, its saguaro cactus marching off into the distance, and the Sawtooth Mountains. Where can you put all those vistas? It’s going to take a whole country to fit them in. The more you think of, the more memories there are.

People, places, and now things—the dress you wore to your junior prom, your first lace-up ice skates, the plush rabbit that your stepfather called Queen Victoria, your grandfather’s milk cans that you pretended were horses, an apple crostada the way your wife bakes it, a rusty pair of Vise-Grip pliers your neighbor left clamped on an outdoor spigot.

Even a person who has never been to Europe or seen every state in the union needs a pretty big space for all the vistas, people, buildings, and things. Her country may be the size of Oklahoma, and yours could be bigger.

If you are open to a short safari into the country of memory, just fifteen minutes will give you enough things to write about to last all morning. And you can take along your thermos of coffee and your comfortable chair.

Those people, places, and things are rooted in your memory because of something the people did, and something that happened in those places, and something you or someone else did with those things. Every one of those nouns is attached in your memory to a verb.

When people get old and forgetful, we speak of their loss of short-term or long-term memory. As we understand it, short-term memory is like a to-do list. It retains activities that might matter quite a bit at the moment—some errand that needs to be run, some bill to be paid—but over the long course of a life, these minor activities aren’t at all memorable and it’s no wonder they’re easy to forget. The file drawer of occurrences that carry some personal significance, however trivial they may have seemed at the time—that’s what remains in long-term memory. How fortunate it is that long-term memory is the last to go. Your country of memory is always close within you, always open to exploration, and you have this for most of your lives.

Who says you have nothing to write about? You have a whole country!