Memories

The way you wear your hat / The way you sip your tea / The memory of all that / No they can't take that away from me. George and Ira Gershwin's song has been going through my head for about a week now, ever since I concluded a blog post by stating that memories, it turns out, are the most durable of our possessions. I’ve been wondering if that assertion, as bald as its author, is really true.

First of all, they can take that away from me if I fall a victim to dementia, the chances of which are increasing year by year. But many memories have already fallen away. The year my wife and I spent in Addis Ababa, for example, constituted such a vivid experience that we were convinced we would never forget its details. Yet what I remember more than 40 years later is fragmentary. I recall, for example, a large bougainvillea, brilliantly red against a white wall, seen from the car as we made a hairpin turn on a hilly road. But where was that wall and when did I see it and where was I going? I remember barefoot women carrying jugs of water on their heads on the road outside our home, but I don’t remember the clothes they were wearing or the color or size of the jugs, or even the direction in which they were walking. Nor do I remember when or for how long the young goat – later slaughtered, roasted, and eaten in honor of an important holiday – was tethered in our compound. Was it black, brown, white? So much has blurred. So much has been forgotten.

About twenty years ago, when I was away from home, I bought one of Anthony Trollope’s novels. A great fan of his, I read it with my usual pleasure. When I returned home and put it on the shelf, I found another copy of the novel. Since I’m the only Trollope reader at home, it was clear that I had read the novel once before but that I had had no memory of it the second time around.

Memories fall away and the memories we retain may change. Several years ago, when a good friend, a retired supreme court justice from New South Wales, came to visit, I accompanied him to the New York State Supreme Court in Brooklyn so that he might experience a case being heard. The courthouse was on the street where I had lived for several years immediately before my marriage. I had remembered the courthouse as standing across the street from my house and was flabbergasted to find it right next door.

Most of us have had similar experiences. My brother and I sometimes have such wildly divergent memories of youthful occurrences that we might as well have grown up in different households. But just as the courthouse didn’t move itself across the street, my brother and I didn’t live apart during the most formative period of our lives.

I recall a short story that consisted of a woman’s three narrations of the same event, an encounter between her and a man in the field behind her house. When she told the story as a young woman, she was raped. When she told it again as a middle-aged woman, she was seduced. In the final version, told as an old woman, she and the man had been lovers who met by assignation. What was the truth? And was each version equally true to the woman each time she told it?

So if memories are unreliable and if, one by one, they decided to retire, as Billy Collins puts it, to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones, are our memories really our most durable possession as I had so rashly claimed? In defense of my statement, durable doesn’t mean immutable nor does it mean imperishable. Just as a house is no less solid for having changed over time or for being subject to destruction, at least some of our memories are equally substantial, as real to us as the fingers on our hands. I treasure, for example, my memory of my friend the supreme court justice, the Honorable Ronald Cross, especially now that he is no longer alive. My memories of him are real to me – the way he bowed before the New York State judges before taking his seat in the courthouse here, the anecdotes he related, the jokes he told, the little tuft of hair on his left cheekbone, the photograph of him standing straight and tall between two shorter RAF colleagues in front of one of the Spitfires they flew during the Battle of Britain - colleagues who did not survive the war. These memories as tangible to me as the computer on which I’m typing. They've outlasted him and would remain if the courthouse or the freighter on which we first met were demolished tomorrow. No, they can’t take that away from me. At least, not yet.