Making Memories and Hooking Them Later
Hi, everyone! This week I want to discuss what I call “Life Hooks”—the recording of memories that lets us yoke our life experiences together.
I’ve never had much of a memory. We moved around a lot when I was young, so every year I’d be in a new place, and all those visual cues to memory (the chair my grandmother sat in, the kitchen where I started a fire while making popcorn) were left in the old place.
But years ago, for my parents’ 50th anniversary, I was in charge of making up a “memory book” of old photos. There are eight of us siblings, so I delegated each a town the family had lived in along the way, with the assignment of choosing some photos associated with that place and writing down a memory.
What I learned from that process is that we each remember different things, but also different sorts of things. I regret to tell you that what I remember are old grievances (like the time my big brother told me to do a swan dive into the snow off the back porch in Elgin, IL, assuring me that it would just be like jumping onto a big pillow: Note to self, never trust a big brother’s assurances).
Mark (that very big brother) remembered every one of the cars we had, and since my dad would buy old junkers that couldn’t last, he had to remember a lot of them. Rick, the youngest, remembered a single crystalline experience of going out into the desert and seeing the stars like they’d just burst into flame. We all remembered… but different things in different ways.
Another lesson was that the very fact of recording a memory brought up a dozen more, and that as my parents paged through the memory book, they recalled events and experiences none of us had ever heard of. It was as if they could live them again—and significantly, they remembered only happy things, or at least things that were amusing in retrospect.
The memories weren’t lost, but they needed a “hook” to become accessible. And that hook was the sharing of our collective memories.
As we baby boomers move protesting and incredulous into our senior years (btw, I just saw a book title, “You’re Never Too Old to Rock and Roll,” which could be our battle cry), I think we’re going to need to find more of those memory hooks.
We were most of us more dedicated to “living in the moment”, keeping our options open, and trying new things to get much into ritual and tradition, which are the most common ways of “hooking” memories. Many of us have moved far away from our homes and families, discarding boxes of junk and mementos on the way. Now we look back at a lifetime and find that we don’t have a lifetime’s worth of memories available for review.
But of course we do. Experience carves actual pathways through our brains—that’s where the memories are stored—and we have them, but it’s like they’re up on a high shelf in a distant corner of a dusty attic in an abandoned house. We need a way to find them and bring them back into the light of life.
More next week about the importance of “life hooks” to catch and hold memories.
