Every week I have a Tuesday-afternoon Zoom with two of my children. Just for the record, I had four children. One was killed in an accident in his thirties. And my surviving son is a professional athlete; although we invite him to join us he is rarely available because he is usually off at practice or is playing in a tournament of some sort.
Anyway: here we are on a recent Tuesday.
(A friend, when this was posted on FB, commented: “The blonde genes win again”)
Most of our Tuesday conversation involve a lot of nostalgia. This week we talked about Christmases from the past. (Just now, writing this, I remembered one that I forgot to bring up with them….the year that under our Christmas tree was a gift from family friends. It was a large wheel of Cheddar cheese from Vermont. We didn’t know that, of course…it was wrapped in festive paper. But during the night, while we all slept with visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads, our Newfoundland dog sniffed it out and ate it, the whole five pounds, wrapping paper and all, and then vomited all over the rest of the heaped gifts.)
Somehow, in the course of the conversation, they began talking about the “things we found in the attic when we moved to that house.” A broken violin, they remembered.
Wait a minute, I said. That house didn’t have an attic. Basement, yes. Two stories, five bedrooms on the second floor. But there was no attic.
Well, they backtracked. Maybe you’d call it a crawl space. You couldn’t stand up straight in it. It was very primitive.
I was drawing a complete blank. But there were no stairs, I pointed out. That house only had two floors.
Mom, don’t you remember? There was an opening in the ceiling of the guest room closet.
The ceiling of the guest room closet? An opening? A broken violin? I lived in that house for YEARS. I take great pride in my memory. But I have absolutely no memory of any of that.
I wonder if they remember the dog and the cheesy vomit.
****
The whole concept of memory has always been a fascination of mine…memory, and dreams. I’ve dealt with both things in books along the way. Thinking about it now, I went and looked up a passage in a book of mine, Autumn Street, that was published in (I just checked) 1980. It’s one of several books that, although written as fiction, was autobiographical: set in the year, 1942, that my father went off to the Pacific during WWII, and my pregnant mother took my sister and me to Pennsylvania, where we moved into our grandparents’ house and waited for the baby to be born. I was 5 and my sister was 8 at the time. We shared a bedroom in my grandparents’ house.
Here is the passage I was remembering:
Her dreams would always be different from mine.
That was true, of course. It’s a phenomenon every human experiences at some point: the realization that they are separate, individual beings. That their dreams…and their memories…are unique. I once talked with a cousin about a Fourth-of-July picnic we had both attended, as children, with our families. I commented that as a child I was so shy, such an introvert, that I was always on the sidelines, a silent observer, while the other children ran around and shouted exuberantly. My cousin Betty actually got out a videotape she had had made from an old home movie: a film of the same Fourth-of-July event we’d been discussing. And there I was. Silently observing? Nope. I was running around gleefully shrieking with the rest of the kids.
I guess I had remembered a different moment. Or perhaps just the feeling of being an outlier and onlooker.
During the conversation by Zoom the other day, I mentioned a Christmas when I was 12, living in Tokyo, and in celebration I had been dressed up in full Japanese gear and my dad took my picture as I stood self-consciously in the front porch.
My daughter asked me to send her the photo, which she didn’t remember having seen, and when I did, and with it my description of myself (awkward, self-conscious, with braces on my teeth) she responded:
NEW KNOWLEDGE! For me: of an attic and a violin.
Her dreams would always be different for mine. So, too, her memories.
Have been thinking of memory also and the unique perspective, often skewed, of how I view myself. Thank you for the insights, I laughed aloud relating to the film that showed you playing yet for some reason feeling an outsider!
Thanks for sharing this delightful piece and so happy you have this time with your daughters. Do our misremembering impact the way we live? If we remember being shy (but that wasn't actually the case) could it reinforce this behavior as an adult?