Remember When? Part One, most likely.

I think it's safe to say I am obsessed with the concept of memory. I mean, I think too much anyway--about anything and everything--but when it comes to memory, my head nearly explodes because it is such a complex, multifaceted idea. I return to it a lot in my writing (especially poetry), and it has recently wiggled its way into my artwork alongside time (which is another discussion entirely--and another obsession I'm sure I'll return to at some point). It makes sense, though, that I'm so preoccupied with it; isn't a huge part of what we think about memory outside of the immediate action of the moment? Our knowledge is based on memory.

I'm not an expert, by any means. I intend to do a lot more research in the near future. A lot of my musings at this point are merely that: muses. 

Anyway, I'm home for the weekend to spend time with my parents. I was talking with my mom after she got home from work last night, and I noticed one of the picture frames I'd helped put together for my sister's high school graduation a few years back, propped against one wall in the dining room. They'd been there for awhile, and as my habit is when I go anywhere, I looked at the pictures.* The ones included in it were those Mom and I had picked out; I remember the stories behind what's going on in many of the pictures, but there was one picture in particular that struck me. It is of my sister and my cousin Betsy, taken in the rainforest area at the Henry Doorly Zoo. My sister is smiling, Betsy is giving a shy smile, and they are pausing to pose along one of the vine-framed paths. It's not that I'd forgotten about the picture; when I saw it again last night, it hit me that I had 'forgotten' (i.e. I had not thought about) that day in ages. In a brief moment, I remembered how shy Betsy was when she was that young, how much Heidi, my sister, had changed in the time between the day the picture was taken and today. I remembered that the reason for the outing was to celebrate my aunt's visit from California, and most of Mom's side of the family had been there that day to go to the zoo. I remembered that my grandfather had gone that day, but my grandmother had not (but I couldn't remember the reason why). That was the day we'd had the chance to see the Desert Dome, walked through the Aquarium arch in which sharks would "swim" over you. But not much else beyond that. 

I remember a lot of strange, random things when I'm home. Some are good, some are bad. I feel like I remember more when I make these visits back home: things that I didn't necessarily want to think on--a lot of my memories of elementary school, junior high, and high school fall into this category--but also really good things about visiting family and our trips to Michigan, Mount Rushmore, and Nebraska, things that I treasure about my own experience with my parents and sister, good friend memories, etc. By merely being in that small town environment, seeing the places I attended school, frequented in my childhood and adolescence, I am both bombarded and blessed with the memories I had stored in the back of my mind. A lot of them are jumbled, and I forget details, but I certainly remember why they are important to me. They must matter in some way, or I wouldn't remember them, right? 

In the case of the zoo picture, I worried that if I had not looked at the picture, I would not have remembered anything about that day in the way I did, with the memories tagging along, one right after another. I remember going there, but those little details that those pictures brought back to me...would I have been able to present them to myself?**

*I love looking at picture albums, etc. When I was little and we'd visit my grandparents, I remember spending hours upon hours just looking through all the old, new, and in-between photographs they had. I  love the stories they tell, and I entertained myself imagining what stories they could be telling (or making up things if I had no knowledge of the reality behind them). 

**Pictures vs. pure memory is also something I'm interested in....see what I mean? THERE IS SO MUCH TO THINK ABOUT.