The Way Were : Sunday musings…8/18/2024
“Memories light the corners of my mind. Misty water-colored memories of the way we were.” (The Way We Were: Bergman, Bergman, and Hamlisch).
“I used to remember everything, but now I only remember the things that never happened.” –Mark Twain.
Twain never disappoints, does he? There’s all kinds of meat on that bone. Is he saying that he no longer remembers things that really happened, only those things he imagined at the time, or imagines now? Or is he rather saying that looking back on his life he only remembers those things that SHOULD have happened, but didn’t?
Knowing Twain, my bet is that his answer would be:”yes.”
Memory is a funny thing. Partly accurate reportage, one’s memory is leavened by equal parts wishful thinking and regret. At least according to Twain. Think of your own narrative, the telling of your story. How much is fact, how much is embellishment (never let the facts interfere with a good story!), and how much is what you wish had happened? We were telling stories at dinner the other night, stories we all knew, ones we’d all taken part in creating and ones we’ve told countless times. Each time they are told they get a little better. Does this happen with you? Some of the stuff in our stories probably never really happened, but we remember it just the same.
“Scattered pictures of the smiles we left behind. Smiles we gave to one another for the way we were.”
After my love letter to Cape Week a couple of weeks ago two of my siblings have gently accused me of looking at Cape Week, and by extension I believe at least just a little bit all of our past, through rose-colored glasses. Is this true? Meh, of course it is. Without the aid of the modern technologies that allow us to document chapter and verse of nearly every event in our today lives through the use of our ever-present mondo-pixeled pocket cameras and the vast repositories that live in literally and figuratively in the clouds, we would be left not so much with the “what” of our stories but rather by the memories of how we felt while those stories were being created. Countless neuro-psych studies have shown that humans remember the emotions felt during an event much more accurately than they do the factual details.
There have been times in my life that literally rocked the foundations of who I thought I was. Occurrences that literally had me sprinting down Prometheus’ hill just barely in front of my boulder as it threatened to flatten everything I thought was right in life. Everything that anchored me, formed the foundation upon which I was building whatever “me” meant. At dinner last night our friends talked about “experimentation” during our school years. They were astonished by how little I’d actually done, and when they asked me why I recounted a story about a 5 on 1 fight I lost in rather spectacular fashion that was triggered by my refusal to join a group of my oldest friends as they “inhaled”. The details were as dry and the recounting as rote as memorializing an EKG during a doctor’s visit, but in the telling I was transported back to the 14 year old boy who’d just lost 5 of his oldest friends. I was just as crushed, felt the loneliness and loss at dinner, at age 64, as I’d been on that Friday night so long ago.
“If we had the chance to do it all again tell would we? Could we?’
Twain also touches on regret in this quote, don’t you think? Things that could have been, or should have been, but for one reason or another, never were. Dangerous ground, that. Regret can turn the urn of happiness into a sieve. To regret, to say that you deeply and truly wish that something had not happened, that you could have a mulligan and do whatever it was differently, means that you are saying that everything that happened after that moment has been insufficiently wonderful and that you would trade it all to not have had the moment in question. It simply can’t be any other way. It’s why regret is such a dangerous indulgence in my mind. In his later years Twain was said to be increasingly bitter. One wonders if his regret fertilized the weeds in the garden of his memory.
“Memories may be beautiful and yet what’s too painful to remember we simply choose to forget.”
All stories, it seems, have parts that are wonderful and beautiful, and parts that are not. Was Cape Week all sunshine and skittles, the air in our beach house perfumed with nothing more noxious that unicorn farts? Nope. Not even a little bit. Come on, we had 4 families with kids in two houses next door to one another, all together and under the iron fist of a matriarch who demanded full attendance every moment of the week. There was all kinds of stuff I have chosen to forget.
People sometimes choose to remember an event, sometimes even an event that others present disagree ever happened, and build a narrative around it that influences how they interact with the other people who were there at the time. In their defense, it’s no different: they remember the negative emotions they felt and do the opposite of what I’ve done, keeping those memories front and center in their minds and making decisions in the present based on bad feelings born in the past. Rather than choosing to forget, or even to put beneath the comfort of happy memories, each new story must first climb through the briar patch before it reaches the meadow.
“So it’s the laughter we will remember, whenever we remember the way we were.”
My siblings “rose-colored glasses” quip is really just a good-natured jibe, a tiny, gentle tease about my worldview in general and the Cape in particular. Judging by the simply lovely friendships that we four and our spouses enjoy we have all decided in our own ways to remember first, and most often, the laughter. The memories of of the parts of our stories that made us happy. That made us feel seen, or appreciated, or loved. Some of us are better at the remembering part, and to be honest when I try I can remember pretty much every minute of most stories whether good or bad. At the same time some of us are better at the part about what we choose to remember, and again, if I’m being honest with my siblings and the rest of my family, I really do try to find those rose-colored glasses as much as I can, and I really do try very hard to make them fit.
There’s so very little time left. So many memories already made and so little time to make more. There’ll be more laughter, but soon the only thing left will be the memories of that laughter. We choose not only what we remember now but how we choose to live with the memories today. Soon enough memories will be all that is left. And the rosier my memories the more laughter there seems to be as we make the newest of our memories, and that makes me smile.
I’d like to think that people will put on their own rose-colored glasses and smile as they look back on the way we were.
I’ll see you next week…
This entry was posted on Sunday, August 18th, 2024 at 1:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.