A Writer's Memory

A short time ago, I posted about mind games I play with myself that I attributed to my writer's brain. Things like listing attributes of particular items off the top of my head, or cataloguing rock and roll songs, or even bands, into categories. The things we do when bored, eh?

Well, the other thing that I think many writers have is a weird memory. Not all writers I've spoken with do, but an awful lot of them, it turns out, remember minute details, conversations pretty much verbatim, and strange factoids. We can be killers at Trivial Pursuit.

I didn't realize not everyone remembers things that way. One time I was in the car with some friends and a song came on the radio. Someone said, "Who sings this again?" And without thinking, I gave her the name of the band, the year it came out, what grade level we were in in high school when the song hit the charts, and what I was wearing in my most vivid memory of listening to it back in the day. She gave me a very strange look and said, "Do you always do that?"

That. Shortly after the incident, I began to realize that not everyone remembers details like the fact that "The Addams Family" aired in Chicago on Friday nights and starred Carolyn Jones as Morticia. Or that the first time I ever saw Mark Hamill, he was playing Laurie Partridge's boyfriend, Jerry, on The Partridge Family. Then I saw him on General Hospital as the nephew of nurse Jessie Brewer. Well heck, going back to The Partridge Family, the first time I saw David Cassidy, he was playing an angry, diabetic kid on Marcus Welby, MD. I remembered both Mr. Hamill and Mr. Cassidy because they set off the "Cute Guy Alert" in my teeny-bopper brain.

I didn't think I was particularly weird because Jim can do lots of this, too. (Maybe he should be writing?) We can pretty much name every teacher we had in grade school, and what class we had with them. I haven't quizzed him recently, but I can also name every teacher I had in high school, including student teachers, what class each of them taught, and what grade I was in when I had them.

I know Sister Rosetta introduced me to Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" in Cultural Heritage class, and I still remember her final exam where we had to identify the first movement of "Winter". Also, Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring", and a painting of Etruscan flute players.

Then there's the factoids: Alexander Graham Bell's wife was deaf; Pistol Pete Maravich scored 3,667 points during his college career at LSU (people who went to high school with me should smile at that one!); Cat Stevens wrote the Tremeloes' hit "Here Comes My Baby"; Liszt used to bring Chopin to parties with him because Chopin was the chick magnet... All sorts of strange items stuck away in my head that I don't always know are there until they pop out when the topic arises. Or when I'm watching Jeopardy. (Did you know that Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to Edgar Allen Poe as "The Jingle Man"? Got that one from my English prof freshman year at U of I. Also, Lord Byron had a club foot.)

Maybe there's a ton of you out there thinking, so what? I do that all the time, too. If so, perhaps YOU should be writing. I didn't think of it as being connected until I read an interview with Judy Blume who mentioned that she had a memory that hung onto details indefinitely. She then proceeded to describe her first day of Kindergarten, what she was wearing, what the teacher was wearing, and other particulars. Some might say that we all remember things like that because they're big days in our lives. And some of that may be true. But I remember (and I bet Ms. Blume does, too) things from days that weren't so important. Like my favorite nightgown when I was nine years old. I inherited it from my sister when she outgrew it, and I was so happy when I got it. Or how I used to make paper airplanes constantly and hid all the best-flying ones in the bookshelf that held our Encyclopedia Britannica. 

So what have you got stored away in your own memory system? Brilliant flashes of spectacular days? Wistful glimpses of days long gone? The mating habits of preying mantises? It's all good. And if you write, well, it can be even better!

(By the way, the top picture has nothing to do with this piece of writing - I just thought I'd throw that one up there since I hardly ever give it any "press time"!)

(Almost) Total Recall

 

Are you, like me, haunted by memories? And can you also say, like I do, that I hope that is true for the rest of my life?

I sometimes think I am on a fast track to Alzheimer's, and I don't mean that to be offensive in any way. I've even gone to see a neurologist who asked me the test questions and administered the little games meant to see if my memory is slipping up in any way. He thought I was fine. (But he also wanted to see me in a year. What did that mean???) I peruse articles about dementia, Alzheimer's, senility, and Lewy Body, studying early symptoms and comparing them to my own experiences.

One of the things that always jumps to the fore is the idea that a lot of patients with the above-mentioned conditions are great with memories of childhood and the past; better, in fact, at recalling grade school buddies than what they might have had for lunch yesterday. That is becoming truer for me than it was before. I like to think that I am running out of memory storage and that's why I have all the old stuff and don't retain all of the new stuff, but I'm not sure that's quite it.

Doctors say that people with Alzheimer's will forget basic things like what a watch is for, or how to work with a checkbook. Normal people, they say, are more likely to forget a name, or a face, or some other item that frequently will swim up to their conscious memory minutes or even hours later. Normal people have that tip-of-the-tongue thing going, like I do. Doctors also say that stress, lack of sleep, and lack of exercise can play havoc with one's ability to remember, as do some non-neurological health issues, and some medications. And all of that is reassuring.

But I don't want to lose my memory. Sometimes people tell me that I have a strange one. I'll give them that, I guess. I used to think that everyone remembered almost everything like I did, but lots of people I talk to can barely remember high school, let alone what they liked to wear when they were five years old (I favored corduroy overalls, myself). So maybe the way my memory functions is slightly different than the memories of other people. 

But I have since met other writers whose minds work rather like mine: I can recall every teacher I had in grade school and high school, entire conversations from thirty-five years ago, a song of rebellion dating back to the Spanish-American War that my sixth grade teacher played during music class; what my favorite umbrella looked like when I was in high school, the songs that were playing on the radio during my freshman (and Sophomore and junior and senior) year/s of college when I drove to class in the morning, and lots of other probably useless and ridiculously detailed bits of information. I think writers -some of us- need to have that so that we don't struggle so much with writing background and day-to-day scenes when we work.

Back in the day when I was reading John D. MacDonald and his amazing Travis McGee books, I remember him writing that McGee's friend Meyer had a memory like a house filled with rooms containing different kinds of information. When McGee wanted to know something and he asked Meyer about it, his friend would disappear into one of those rooms and then come back out with the answer.

Fast forward to the movie Dreamcatcher, based on the novel by Stephen King. The character Jonesy had a "memory warehouse."  I will never forget the sight of Damian Lewis trundling his wheelbarrow through that warehouse and passing collections of things like "song lyrics." 

Unlike the Medieval scholars, I don't have a memory palace. I don't even a warehouse like Jonesy. I've always thought of my own memories as being in something like an old-fashioned card catalog at the library. I have a thing about alphabetical order (ask anyone who knows my CD collection) so I guess that's not surprising. Lately I've been worried about that card catalog, though. I really don't want to lose track of my memories.

Especially the really evocative things like certain songs, or certain smells, that can bring me back into an entire time/place/setting/event in a way that is so real that I used to think I could time travel if I tried hard enough. There are times when an old conversation with someone from years ago will play like a movie through my head and I would swear that if I reached my hand out just the right way, I could touch that person again. I am haunted, in that respect, and that is something I never want to lose. 

Judy Blume once wrote that she could remember what she wore to school her first day of Kindergarten. Maybe those of us writers who are fascinated by memories tend to find ways to write about them: MacDonald and McGee's friend Meyer; King and the memory warehouse; more recently, J.K. Rowling and the pensieve. I love that concept. There are times I could use a pensieve.

But to get back to memory. I played with it in Saving Jake. Part of the premise of that book, the particular "what if" question (a "what if" question or two can be found at the base of everything I write) was, "What if someone was so good at retrieving memories that he could actually walk around in someone else's?" And along came Philip Corts.

Memory is an amazing thing. It's also double-edged in that if you are the kind of person to retain memories, you retain ALL of them, not just the fun or happy ones. And those vivid memories of past hurts, betrayals, disappointments, rejections, can still wound. Some might call it dwelling on the past, but it really isn't about dwelling on anything. I don't have to go very far into myself to pull up past injuries. And that was summed up by yet another writer, William Faulkner, when he wrote: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Are you like that, too? It's kind of a strange way to live. But I like it.