Memory

I woke up this morning thinking about the power of memory, and how Dave and I remember many of the same things from our 37-year shared past, but we remember them in different ways. There's also the added bonus that he recollects incidents that I have completely forgotten, and vice-versa. Between the two of us, we're almost able to reconstruct events, feelings and sequences with uncanny accuracy--but then there are also random, total blanks for both of us.

We always think we're going to remember things with the clarity of the moment they happen. "I'll never forget this moment!" we declare. And then, decades later, we do forget. We need photos or journals or another person (with a better long-term memory) to jog us backwards.

Dave was the photographer, I was the writer, so you'd think that between the two of us, we'd have a pretty good photojournalistic account of our trips and our history. But we're both disorganized packrats--we never throw anything away, but who knows where to find Pam's America diaries or Dave's thousands of slides?

Dave brought up a heavy container from the basement on his last evening here. Inside was a treasure--black and white 8 x 10 prints and contact proof sheets that Dave developed himself in the on-campus darkroom when he was teaching me the basics of photography. Candid portraits of "our gang" at a Thanksgiving party, complete with babies in backpacks (who are now in their thirties!); moving day scenes; my first wedding, on campus in 1972, when the trees were baby sticklings and most of the college hadn't been built yet; group photos of long-haired hippie boys and granny-dressed hippie girls! What a hoot!

In some cases, Dave would remember all names that I had forgotten. I could remember the venues (and even some of the food we served--why would I remember that?), that Dave couldn't recall. Luckily, sometime in the past, I had written the year on the back of the photos, otherwise we would both have been guessing the "when." Because Dave still works at the University, he had a much better handle on the "where."

There was Molly, looking beautiful, in her BIG 70s eyeglasses (we all had HUGE spectacles and fluffy layered hair)! There was Donan and Galvez, Leslie and Tiger, Terry and whoever her boyfriend at the time was. My mom and dad playing pool together (yes, they came to our college parties), and looking...well, the age we are now! And young! Oh my goodness, our faces so unlined, so unmarked by experience, or grief, or life, or sun-damage!

There is almost a sense of ruefulness for how naive, how sweet, how relatively simple we all were; a sadness of time gone by in what feels like a blink, but was actually three-plus decades. The power of memory is that it does remain so vivid, it takes us back to times and places where we recapture the feelings, even though our bodies have changed and so much more experience has stitched itself into the matrix of mind and character. Time marches inexorably on, yet staring at the pictures, I can almost step right back inside the person I used to be, and remember darned near everything, even the painful stuff I worked so long and hard at forgetting, thank you very much.

There's a lesson here, but I'm not quite getting it yet. I'll try again: We thought ourselves fully-formed at that young age, I can see it in these photographs. There's an unguarded joyfulness, a hint of arrogance, a patina of confidence. The years and experiences we've added to that baseline of young adulthood, positive and negative, change us, but not necessarily in any fundamental way. Looking back, from the perspective of middle-age, I feel a nostalgia for those simpler people, but I don't feel very much changed in any significant way. It's still us, just more layered.

Maybe it's just the inevitable differences between the Pam 2.0 version versus the current Pam 5.5?