Memory

An archaic definition of “quickening” is the moment during pregnancy when the life force enters a fetus and he or she becomes a baby.  No, I’m not entering the debate about when life begins nor will I argue any of the political positions.  This is just one more story for entry in the cigar box. 

What I remember were the evenings.  These were evening during the part of the year when days were shortening and darkness came well before bedtime.  During some of those evenings we would lay in bed and the mother of our daughters would say put your hand right here.  Just as I did, the little rascal would kick me.  Of course, in those days, we didn’t know whether that rascal was a boy or a girl but I do not remember ever wishing for one or the other.  I do remember panic and joy spinning together like strands of long shiny hair being braided into pigtails.  Pigtails like the ones our daughters would wear to Mrs. Smythe’s preschool or later to kindergarten.

While the value of corporal punishment may have been debunked, I must admit to remembering the first spanking, a tentative swat on the buttocks, for each of them.  I don’t believe it hurt either of us as much as it scared both of us.  The two of them dealt with such discipline differently but it scared me to think that I could lose my temper at the antics of little person one seventh of my size.  In the quiet moments at day’s end, the spanking memory grew and my mind wrestled and resolved to find a better way.

I also remember spankings I received.  For the most part my memory suggests I earned every one of them.  I don’t remember them hurting or being particularly scary.  They were simply the price for behavior that spankings didn’t have the power to dissuade.  I was, however, never able to see spankings in quite the same light when I was on the delivering end.  No matter how vivid a memory is, we should know that memory is more like clay than stone.  Over the years, each lump of clay is pressed and formed to fit in the cracks of accumulated experience.  Molded memories become interchangeable and conform to the pressures bearing down during any given day.  So it is that no two people can ever remember the same event in the same way.

What I’ve wondered is whether my daughters remember my hand resting on their mother’s womb while I waited for their first high five or karate kick or whether memory started later with that first swat to the bottom.  Does memory blend the different touches originating from the same origin?  Is a lost or modified memory like traveling back through time and rewriting history?  What was the foundation on which my daughters’ memories would be constructed?

Early today I was returning to the office and my Mini Cooper was buffeted briskly by gusty winds.  As I completed the jug handle entrance ramp on to I-470, one lone goose stood in the loop looking transfixed – almost perplexed.  I have no idea how he arrived at this point.  My guess was that he didn’t remember either.  He looked as if he couldn’t decide whether to cross the road or to turn and take flight.  So he stood completely still.  It is possible that geese don’t have memory – only instinct – and instinct hasn’t had enough generations with speeding hunks of steel to let the goose know what to do.  But a stolid goose could be one more symbol of memory’s frailty and fallibility.

Other than those who’ve been ravished by Alzheimer’s or other such aggressors, most of us have the capacity for memory.  Sometimes, as in autism, memory is recorded in ways that we haven’t developed the capacity to fully understand.  In some instances humans must be wired with instincts that preclude the need for memory to motivate appropriate actions.  When memory is summoned but doesn’t come, we are kindred spirits with the deer standing in the middle of the road staring into the oncoming lights or to the goose transfixed in highway median.

This blog is memory.  Its entries recount the fallible memories molded in my mind and related to things I think I’ve learned.  It is about the seeds for creating new memories for my grandsons.  It offers memories to others who lift the lid and peer inside this cigar box.  Whether archaic or not, I think the “quickening” is that moment in life when memory begins to be – it is when history becomes events that are soon remembered as molded memory.

--td