When you are born you should be presented with a 70-year-diary, every day already filled in, a bright red ribbon tied around the cover. Then, as you work your way through life, you could constantly check where you were up to and what lay ahead. Or perhaps it would be best to leave it closed, the ribbon left done up.
Tag: genealogy
In a strange land
We all have strangeness
in our own lives
our own families
our own family history.
Do we not?
Eye of the storm
My childhood home
had a “lounge room”,
a room in the centre of the house
almost never used, but with the best furniture,
rarely sat upon, the piano,
not played, fallen silent,
since my grandfather died,
too young, too young,
and the record player.
It was, in theory, the place
where important visitors could
be taken. But most of our
visitors were unimportant, friends,
who were happy sitting in the kitchen.
The Minister of our church
might have qualified in importance,
I suppose,
but he rarely if ever came.
So it was a quiet room,
a dark room with no window,
a neat room with no mess,
no detritus of living.
It was in the very centre
of the house, surrounded
by rooms full of activity and noise –
kitchen, bathroom, bedrooms, laundry,
television room, dining room.
Every house needs a quiet, still, centre,
a place for reflection.
So does every human being.
Deceptive
I look at my hands,
their backs an old man’s hands.
I look at my feet,
their toes an old man’s toes.
I look at my face,
its wrinkles show an old man’s face.
But,
I look in my mind,
its curiosity is a young man’s still.
Smell the roses
You spend your early life doing things for the first time. You spend your late life doing things for the last time. In between you do a whole lot of things without really noticing. Sadly.
Memories are made of this
Proust’s taste of a madeleine catapulted him to the memory of a time and place. We all have our madeleine moments. Perhaps, like Proust, the taste of a cake, or of fish and chips, or of a certain flavour of soda drink. Not just tastes though – smells: of a wood fire, or sun lotion, or road tar on a hot day; sounds: a popular song, a bird call, a bat hitting a ball; touch: the feel of canvas, or a blanket, or a dog; sights: the Sun setting over the ocean, a vintage motor bike, a movie.
But beyond these specific memories of time and place triggered by sensations, we also have “memory chains”. A chain can start with a word or a phrase, read or heard. The word triggers memory of a person or place or event, that memory in turn can take us to another event, person, place, which in turn takes us still further, each trigger reaching further back in time in our lives.
But there is a limit to how far back any chain can stretch (rather like the limit on how far we can see out into the universe because beyond a certain point the light simply can’t reach us as the universe expands). We all think we have a memory (or memories if we are very confident) reaching back to the age of 2 or even one year old. But –
“In a survey of more than 6,600 people, published in Psychological Science, researchers found that 40% of people believe they have a first memory from when they were two or even younger, even though evidence suggests it is not possible for memories from this age to be retained. Around three to three-and-a-half seems to be the agreed age of a first memory, although Martin Conway, the study’s co-author and director of the Centre for Memory and Law at City, University of London, has said it’s “not until we’re five or six that we form adult-like memories due to the way that the brain develops and due to our maturing understanding of the world”.” (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jul/19/sunflowers-and-santa-claus-guardian-writers-and-readers-on-how-their-first-memory-changed-them?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other)
I suspect even 5 or 6 is probably ambitious. I think what happens is that we remember remembering early memories (perhaps even remember remembering remembering and so on) although we have lost the actual primary memory. I mean, if cells are replaced every 7 years (or whatever the figure is, my memory fails me) then by the time you get to my age all your cells have been replaced 10 times over. Including, I think, brain cells.
And there are other sources of false memory (fake news?) – we are told about things that happened by our family, and this implants their memories into ours. We see, all our lives, photos of when we were young – holding grandmother’s hand at the station, sitting on a horse statue, blowing out birthday candles, dressed in fancy dress – and the memory of those photos also become memories we think we have of the event concerned.
So, my earliest memory? Dunno. It can’t be separated from all the false memories that provide a fuzzy image of my youth. But then, most memories are like that. Even when triggered by a madeleine we think we remember eating.
Time’s Up
Life is like an exam in which you struggle to write as much as possible, pack as much into each answer as possible, until the moment when the teacher says “Time’s Up”, and you stop, reluctantly, seeing, on the exam paper, gaps where you could have, should have, said more, places where, gulp, you have expressed something badly, or just plain wrongly, places where you know, just know, if you had a little more time, you could have impressed the examiner with your brilliance. But the clock has stopped, and all you can do is hand in your paper at the teacher’s desk before exiting with the crowd. If only you could have written faster.
Information Age
You know you have moved from the current generation, through the penultimate generation, to the ultimate generation, when there is no one you can ask about things that happened in your childhood.
Stop all the clocks
My grandfather’s fob watch, a present from his father, ticked away all the years and events of the first half of the twentieth century – marriages and births and deaths and wars and emigration and illness and disappointment and much joy. But since he died, in 1953, of a horrible illness, a young man of 62, the watch has sat, silent and still, as 65 years of his grandson’s marriage and births and deaths and displacement and illness and disappointment and much joy has washed over it.
I’m dreaming
Perhaps all our ghosts
are the ghosts of christmases
past, not the present
