I Remember When, Except I Don't

Occasionally it has occurred to me that I should take an index card and write on it my five favorite books, movies and songs, so when, on the rare occasions I am asked what they are, I will be able to say something other than the most recent halfway decent book, movie or song I have read, seen or heard. In other words, I have a retrieval problem with this sort of information, and although I know some people's brains work this way--are able to categorize and recall information like this--mine does not.

But as someone who spends a lot of time thinking and writing about my own past, you would think it would be easy for me to recall my own memories. It used to be easier. Lily has become consumed by asking me to "tell me a story about when you were a little girl." She also enjoys asking Ben, my parents, my grandmother and other adults in her life this question, but mostly she asks it of me, and for the first 500 or so times I willingly complied. And then, the well ran dry. I started telling some of the stories again and again: the old chestnuts, her favorites. The time Alison and I locked ourselves in the bathroom when we had a babysitter had a run. The time my doll Bess was left on a train, another. And, for some reason, a desperation number with paltry action: the time we were in my grandparents' swimming pool with my cousins and an unexpected thunderstorm came on all of a sudden, and we had to run out of the pool in the rain. "And there was lightning?" she always asks, and I wish, for the dozenth time that I could fabricate a tree being split in half, and I say, as I always say, "Later. Later there was a little lightning."

I have started to dread the question. She doesn't want the oldies but goodies anymore; she wants new material, is desperate for it. And although I have been on this earth for 38 1/2 years, with a near photographic memory for about 35 of those, I simply cannot pull any more childhood stories out of my hat. What in god's name did I do every single day for the 17 hours I was awake for the first 12 years or so of my life, which is pretty much all she is interested in? We played outside, when it was nice, all day every day. We played inside when it was not. But I have described our regular activities, and the extraordinary ones, so many times now that I should record my voice and hit play, saving my breath for those increasingly rare occasions when a new memory does squeeze its way into my consciousness.

This happened the other night, in fact. Annika stirred; I rolled onto my side and looked over at the digital clock: 3:54. All of a sudden I sat up in bed. The mouse! The mouse on the edge of the wicker trash basket in Martha's Vineyard in the middle of the night holding the wrappers of our secret candy stash in his curled mouse paws! I had never told Lily this story. For a psychotic, sleep-deprived instant I considered waking her to share it. I did not. And actually, when I awoke, clearer heads or at least a clearer version of my own, prevailed, and I waited until bedtime, until the inevitable question, and when she asked it, I smiled, breathed a lung-filling sigh of relief, and began.

I will write more on this subject. I want to talk about my fascination with my parents' and grandparents' childhood memories, and the legacy we leave with the memories we share, and how incomplete it is, and how certain of the stories take hold in the imagination of a child at a particular age for a particular reason (or not) and how this is both like and not like the stories we create of the past from photographs and other artifacts of the older people we love. But this is all for now. Except another quote, that came to me as I started to write this, from a book I have not read in a very long time:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.