Memories
Yesterday was two anniversaries for me. February 1, 1985. We are in Mobile for our first diocesan convention since moving home from Pennsylvania. Our room is high up in the hotel and I am looking out at a battleship, USS ALABAMA. Phone rings. Joe's voice: you have a grandson! Nicholas Kevin Weller. All his life, I've loved him as my own son. In a cherished memory, a little boy of four or five runs to me as he exclaims, "Granddaddy, I love you just as much as if you were my own daddy."
In another crevice of my mind I hear a bosun's pipe. On each side of me, "sideboys" they're called, three or four three-stripers in service dress blue bravo salute as I return their salute and walk down the steps into Commander, U.S. Navy (Retired). At the reception following, John Irons, a shipmate from fifteen years earlier in Japan, takes Linda aside and warns her to keep an eye on me for depression at leaving the Navy after twenty years. 1 Feb 1978. It has been 38 years and I'm still waiting. I celebrate my Navy memories but have never missed or wanted to go back.
Now this.
Someone I know is tormented by a memory, maybe we are legion, many of us, but I'm not thinking of myself, this is not about me. Like a sermon, it's not about me but for whoever wants to make it personal. About memories.
In another crevice of my mind I hear a bosun's pipe. On each side of me, "sideboys" they're called, three or four three-stripers in service dress blue bravo salute as I return their salute and walk down the steps into Commander, U.S. Navy (Retired). At the reception following, John Irons, a shipmate from fifteen years earlier in Japan, takes Linda aside and warns her to keep an eye on me for depression at leaving the Navy after twenty years. 1 Feb 1978. It has been 38 years and I'm still waiting. I celebrate my Navy memories but have never missed or wanted to go back.
Now this.
Someone I know is tormented by a memory, maybe we are legion, many of us, but I'm not thinking of myself, this is not about me. Like a sermon, it's not about me but for whoever wants to make it personal. About memories.
At least to the extent they’re embedded in a reasonably sane mind, memories are stored recollections of one’s past, one’s history. And may be a liability or an asset through life, balm or torment into life's ending. In her seventies and into her eighties, my aunt Evelyn had a speech that she'd share with elderly folks in care centers about discovering their “Treasure Chest of Memories” as she cast it, as a way beyond loneliness with its depression and despair. I have wondered whether they ever, because memories were bad, remembered better, more happily, than what history recorded. Now, intrigued with the short story In Another Country and its film interpretation 45 Years, I’m worrying with allowing the mind to create and store memories that for whatever reason are fabricated vice historical. Remembering what might have been over what was. In a way, that's where Geoff has gone and, as it is for him, travel down that road could be saving, or could be catastrophic, a step into madness.
Things are not always what they seem or are remembered and said to have been. For example, Heilsgeschichte, our holy history, especially Israel’s holy history with Yahweh, and to some extent the canonical works of the Evangelists including Acts, are not offered as biographical “history” in a modern sense, but as understandings, interpretations, remembrances and reports of things that've happened between us and our God, memories the ancestors passed along, campfire stories from decades in the wilderness, yellow stick-it notes, agenda-driven collections.
Things are not always what they seem or are remembered and said to have been. For example, Heilsgeschichte, our holy history, especially Israel’s holy history with Yahweh, and to some extent the canonical works of the Evangelists including Acts, are not offered as biographical “history” in a modern sense, but as understandings, interpretations, remembrances and reports of things that've happened between us and our God, memories the ancestors passed along, campfire stories from decades in the wilderness, yellow stick-it notes, agenda-driven collections.
If memories may abide in, as EG said, a “treasure chest,” mightn't some of them be fabricated as an artist fabricates an exquisite filigree of jewelry, a landscape or floral painting, portrait or abstract, a novel, movie or television program? A kindergartener's drawing of the family. A photograph from a different angle. Fabricated and stored in memory as reality. Stored for recall at will, is my reality any more or less than yours that is different of the same event? As it's now all and only in my mind anyway, is my wishful thinking that has replaced what actually happened any more or less real than what I discarded? Is there a psychiatric term for such? Repression? Suppression? Does that diagnosis apply if it's intentional? Willed or by hypnosis? None are “real,” they are representations from the artists’ imaginations. As sometimes I hear a politician's speech, or watch online Die Deutsche Wochenschau of events in Europe and Germany from the late 1930s into the mid 1940s: some of what I see and hear I know as fabricated, propaganda, but if people believe it, it was real for them, and irrelevant whether it was so for others.
Wandering, I'm just wandering, riding along with a demon.
Wandering, I'm just wandering, riding along with a demon.
We remember a morning when Linda’s mother awoke to tell us excitedly, quite certainly and absolutely, about a cocktail party she had enjoyed at the Rockefellers the previous evening, and she could not be talked out of it, a dream lodged as real in her memory as if she had really been there. And after all, she was a “party person,” what harm in letting her keep it? She could have told it under oath on a witness stand in court without perjury, or passed a polygraph exam about it. It was in her memory, no matter that it made no sense to those of us who weren’t there.
What if one were to create intentionally, memories of one’s travel down what Robert Frost called “the road not taken” or Scott Peck "the road less travelled." Though Frost's is more innocent and plaintive than Peck's madness, would intentional creation be okay, or might it be a step beyond eccentricity into mental illness? If one believed it once it was imbedded, would it be a fall off the cliff into insanity? Or might it save sanity?
Lucy’s adventure beyond the Wardrobe into Narnia's winter for tea, toast, sardines and cake with Mr. Tumnus the Fawn is as real a memory to me, and the Student Prince impossibly falling in love with the barmaid, as any memory from my historical side. Suppose then, I create memories of what was beyond Frost's fork in the road and out of sight down the road not taken? Suppose I go there instead. And what if, as in my favorite episode of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, escaping, I don’t come back? The devil from what was the real road bursts out the front door to shake a fist and curse me as my car vanishes in the distance and out of sight forever down the other road.
Where my mind goes when hitchhiking and a demon stops to give me a lift.
Or an angel.
Thos+