Nostalgia Destruction Tour - Memory

A self-indulgent post about dealing with old friends who were not as remembered. And yet at another level they very much were, insisting that they had changed while I saw surprising continuities. I understand how that can be just a bit better now.

You may find some useful information about memory in all this anyway. Comments on Daniel Schacter's book, The Seven Sins of Memory, are still to come.

I met with my college friend Sam after the reunion and mentioned two stories about him I had told to my children.  He slightly corrected both of them. "That was probably John Mahler, not Don, because I didn't room with Don until sophomore year." And similarly "That was probably sophomore year, because Don had a car that year.  None of us did freshman year." I instantly saw that he simply must be right in both instances.  Much of getting together with old friends years later is like this. I am usually the one who has the telling detail that others nod at, but have many times been the one who needed to adjust. Sometimes a dispute remains, both of us believing that the other has it wrong. Even this is often amusing, with ongoing mutual teasing about it over a decade. 

Sometimes it is darker, with a person remembering, still with accusing resentment, an incident that the other states did not happen that way, or even denies outright. The artificial smoothing over that "maybe they are both right" will not hold. They both may be wrong. They both may be only partly right. But the paired remembering is contradictory. Often it is easy to see why a person might want a particular claim to be erroneous. It may contain accusations of mean of even criminal behavior. It might make them appear stupid. Other times it is merely baffling. Neither has a clear interest in whether the event took place after work in winter or spring, yet both are fighting for their version. Something else is at play, outsiders cannot tell what.

It is much more likely for a person to forget an incident that happened or consolidate two or more incidents that were similar. This seems obvious, because the drive of the brain toward efficiency is at play. Do we need this? No. Can we mash these together? Yes. Yet I have seen some extreme versions of this over the past few years, and it gives one pause. People forget things that seem impossible. She was your roommate freshman year. You missed the whole season because of grades. Or even, they shot at us.  

Then it is possible that the narrative is so foundational, so required, that it destroys all in its path. It feels unnerving to be in the presence of that.

*******

I found that I remember the good things about people, the witty things they said, their accomplishments, sometimes even things I admired but were generally unnoticed at the time. I have said I have a mind like an attic, full of charming and poignant things of uncertain usefulness. Nostalgia for me is opening trunks and saying "Oh, it's Aunty Em! And there's Toto!" Having actual contact with people - or with their websites and google-stalk info - reminds me of negative aspects I had not forgotten, but had not recalled in years.  

I had forgotten that his sarcasm was not only humorous, but actively mean. I don't think I'd like him much now. 

Her competing with her sister even now reminds me that this girlfriend actually didn't treat me all that well. She was rescued and accommodated then and it seems she has done that all her life and still expects it. 

He just walked away from responsibility in high school too.  I passed it off to immaturity. Guess not.  

These are actively painful for me when I reencounter them now, as if part of my childhood has been stolen.

Yet I revert to my rose-colored prism soon enough. I go to the incidents I loved, and find that I am better than most at enjoying them without regard to what went before or what came after. Like Legolas and the elves perhaps, where memory is evergreen.

I have stressed the continuity of people and this does seem to be something of a contradiction.  Perhaps the difference is not that I could have predicted who they would be now (though that is what it feels like to me) but that I have a greater pool to draw from of what things were in them then that I can use for comparison. 

Your genial, fourth generation salt-water wealth, visible even at 17 and now in its silver haired edition could have gone to putting others at ease like Queen Elizabeth did, but you can't seem to stop talking about your career success, still competing even as you retire. 

You were nerdy and hyperfocused and worried that you might not be smartest and most competent. You could have become intolerable, berating coworkers and having to die on every hill in order to have your way, but you became eccentric in a few side-hobbies instead, mixing with all strata of society with ease. 

You had an aspect of your childhood that was painfully hard, which you could have developed into generosity and tolerance for others who faced hardship, but instead you have redefined seemingly everyone you knew then into an opponent who had to be overcome in order that all-conquering you could emerge. 

All of you claimed to have changed since I knew you, but it is more that you could have gone only a limited number of ways. I can trace you back easily because the tracks into the past are familiar to me. Yet it is possible that my predictions in 1973 would have no better than anyone else's.

It might all have been worth it for the few I found.