Making Memories, and Hooking Them Later
Hi, everyone! I was asked to do a guest post about what I call "Life Hooks"—the recording of memories that lets us yank our life experiences together.
Hi, everyone! I was asked to do a guest post about what I call "Life Hooks"—the recording of memories that lets us yank 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 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.
What I also learned 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 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.
After doing the memory book, I realized that there's something special about the physical representation of memory. I used to scorn my friends who scrapbooked; now I wish I'd been doing that all along, saving the tickets from concerts and films, the cards I'd gotten for my birthday, the scraps of my life which I just threw away. I know now that the act of recording events, capsulizing them into some piece of paper or photo or memento, and gluing them into a book, would hook my memories together. And then they'd always be right there—not so much in my mind as in this physical book, ready to be taken down and paged through whenever I need a reminder of who I used to be.
What is it about an actual book and actual ink and actual photos? I wonder why those are still so significant in these digital days—why we still jot down a to-do list in the morning, rather than just texting ourselves our schedule; why we page through a young couple's white satin wedding album when we've already seen the photos posted on Facebook.
Maybe the physical act of recording captures the physical experience? My sister-in-law Cher Megasko, a frequent traveler, keeps a travel journal and writes down her impressions as she makes each trip. She said, "I journal when I travel abroad, taking care to record lots of unremarkable details. I keep track of each drive we take, every restaurant we eat at ... even things like the number of stray dogs and cats. I'm surprised at how often I go back and read what I've written. Sometimes it's just to reminisce, but I also use it to help plan future trips, even if not to the same destination. My travel journal is my younger daughter's first choice of things to inherit when I'm gone!"
The memoirist and writing teacher William Zinsser echoed the importance of both the recording of the unremarkable, and the usefulness of a physical representation: "When my father finished writing his histories (of the family and his shellac company), he had them typed, mimeographed, and bound in a plastic cover. He gave a copy, personally inscribed, to each of his three daughters, to their husbands, to me, to my wife, and to his 15 grandchildren, some of whom couldn’t yet read…. I like to think that those 15 copies are now squirreled away somewhere in their houses from Maine to California, waiting for the next generation."
My friend Cynthia Furlong Reynolds has also used the physical to capture the ephemeral memories. She once worked to help elderly people record their memories—kind of making their own oral histories-- and told me that they often found it oddly calming. She remembered sitting with one elderly man with dementia, taking notes as he talked about his past. Then she typed up her notes and made them into a little book, which she printed out for him. She tells me his wife found that when he got agitated, just holding the book of memories calmed him. I think it's because knowing the memories were in this paper-and-ink, permanent form freed him from the anxiety that he might forget. He didn't have to constantly remind himself about his childhood home, or his mother's name. All that was here in this book and would always be there for him.
Maybe all this "physical" stuff is just a relic of any earlier age… but I don't know. I had two nieces who are close in age – still teenagers-- but not in geographic proximity, and while of course these days, they kept in touch with texts and emails and Facebook messages. But once we were all together, and they showed me the little wooden boxes where they kept the letters they mailed to each other (yes! envelopes and stamps and all), and here they were, children of the electronic era, holding these pieces of paper and reading the letters out loud and remembering when they'd written them.
Anyway, I'm thinking of printing out some of those photos I have on Pinterest, writing out a note to my mother-in-law by hand for once, maybe even getting a scrapbook and starting—way too late!—to collect the junky little scraps of my days and nights. Maybe then, when my always-bad memory slides into no-memory-at-all, I'll have something to touch and page through that reminds me I indeed did have a life!
What do you think? How do you hook into your memories? How do you remind yourself of what's been and gone? What do you want never to forget?
I'll leave you with a couple pretties to help jog your memories—
Here's a Tim Buckley song about memory, Once I Was.
And a W.B. Yeats poem, "When You Are Old and Gray and Full of Sleep (take down this book)."
Alicia Rasley
My grandmother Alice Pustek in front of the cottage they built in Beverly Shores, IN.
Can’t Start a Fire without a Spark…. Creating that Spark when You Think You're Burnt Out
by Alicia Rasley
You can decide what to love. You can spark the fire.
Enthusiasm doesn’t always arrive fully blown. Sometimes you have to take a little spark and turn it into a flame.
For example, Sam was hauling the Christmas tree off to the mulch pile in the city park when he heard a bird warbling. Its insistent song- weeuh weeuh weeuh—really stood out in the snowy winter day, when most of what Sam could hear was traffic and the cracking of iced-up tree branches above him. He stopped in the middle of the park, forgetting his errand, forgetting the little dead tree in his hands, and wondered, “What sort of bird hangs out all winter in the city?”
He’d never been interested in birds before, and to tell the truth, he wasn’t all that interested now. He was just momentarily intrigued, and made a mental note of it, and – he’s a software guy, so he’s always thinking of things like this—wondered if anyone had ever designed a phone app to record and identify bird songs. (Duh, of course.) But when he’d tossed the tree on the pile and got his phone set to record, the bird was gone, or at least, the song had changed to a long intricate trill of different notes. It was as if the shower-singer had given way to the opera singer.
When he got home, he sat down at the computer and (natch) googled to identify the birds. What he found really intrigued him. He hadn’t heard two birds, each singing their songs, but one bird singing two songs. He started reading about the northern mockingbird, which somehow can imitate other birds’ songs and repeat them back note-perfect.
Now Sam wasn’t any kind of actor or con-man (he was in software development), but he’d always had a secret envy for people who could do impressions of famous voices. So he started reading more about the mockingbird, and the next morning, same time, he went back to the park. This time it wasn’t on a Christmas-shutdown errand, but just to pursue this momentary interest. When he caught sight of the chubby gray-and-white bird, he had his phone handy and was able to snap a picture.
He’d never been into birding, and he’d always thought of it as a pursuit for less-macho people. But he was at loose ends since the divorce and the kids leaving home, and work wasn’t challenging anymore. And he’d been at his company so long, he was up to five weeks vacation a year. So after a few weeks of going to the park and trying to find the mockingbird and its fellows, he thought he might as well take a few days’ birding trip to somewhere warm.
By the time he got back, well, he wasn’t precisely obsessed with birding. But he realized he’d had fun on the trip. The other birders were interesting people, rather like software developers in their temperament (focused and thoughtful) if not their conversation. There were even a couple women he thought could become friends. He decided to emulate the mockingbird a bit and “act as if”—act as if birding was interesting. And what do you know— just sticking with it, and fanning that tiny flame, Sam found himself a new hobby. He never got as passionate about birds as some of his new friends, but he enjoyed being outdoors, and enjoyed the quiet during the hikes and the lively conversation afterwards. Most of all, he liked his new community. A year later, he marvels at how the accident of hearing that little bird in the park led to – well, not a life-change, but a life-opening.
You might remember that great time in your childhood, when you skipped from one fleeting interest to another, and your poor parents shelled out for a drumkit and then a skateboard and then all those watercolors and…. You had all the time in the world to sample potential obsessions, and if you were lucky, one stuck, and you ended up in the city symphony or at least playing "Auld Lang Sine" on the piano late at night on New Year’s Eve.
But you know what? We don’t have time to skip around anymore. We don’t have time to sample. And we know whatever we do isn’t likely to end up as the route to a PhD or fame and fortune. There’s no purpose to new hobbies in the last-chance decade—except to have fun and meet people and maybe do a little good and join or start a community.
Trouble is, without the energy and openness of youth, and with all the usual distractions of everyday, it’s hard to get excited about anything new. It might not be worth all the fuss.
Well, make it worth it. You have more discipline and focus than you did when you were young. You can actually make yourself more interested, now that you know how to move beyond the mere activity into creating a whole situation: That is, you won’t just DO this, you can research it and converse about it and join a group and take trips. You have resources now to make this minor interest into a major part of your life. (And you know if it starts to bore, you can quit it without regret, as it’s only your own money that bought that drumkit or invested in that birding app!)
Some tips to fan a flicker into a flame:
- Consider what, overall, you ought to do, that you’re already thinking you should get going on.
“I really need to get out from behind the computer.”
“I need to get more fit.”
“I need some new friends.”
“I should get more involved with the community again now that the kids are gone.”
“I’ve been so self-absorbed since the break-up.”
“I’m bored. I need to do something fun.”
“I have to exercise my brain more.”
“If I’m going to take that trip to Italy, maybe I should learn some Italian.”
If you can link this existing need to a new hobby, you’ll feel more motivated. Birding will get you outdoors and away from the computer. Volunteering at the city music festival will get you involved with the community. Hiking in the woods will help you get more fit.
2. Think beyond broad categories of activities you used to enjoy, like “nature” and “socializing” and “music.”
Try to pinpoint what you really liked about that, like, “I didn’t care much about all those nature walks, but I sure liked camping in a tent,” or “I thought I was going to be a movie star, but that never worked out. Looking back, what I really liked about acting was the cast parties after first night,” or “I wasn’t much good at the flute, but I still remember how my teacher would accompany us on the piano. I kind of liked the piano, but my parents could only afford a flute.” Once you get into what was the really fun part (camping, cast parties), you can more effectively design a new hobby to create that experience without all the more boring stuff.
3. Look for existing interest groups where you can join at low cost and low commitment.
“Meetup” groups are great for this. You can just show up at the assigned place and play a few games of Scrabble or go to a film or take a hike in the woods with the group. No one will bug you to buy a year’s subscription or run for group president. You can just do the activity in the company of other people who enjoy it.
4. Stick with it for awhile. Of course, if you have a rotten experience—you break your ankle hiking, or the Scrabble players are all PhD linguists who scoff at your words—you might try another group or a related but less intense activity. But if the experience is okay or better, try it again on the next possible occasion. This doesn’t have to end up as a lifelong, life-changing obsession. You just want to have some fun. So don’t require a huge conflagration of passion the first experience. Just remember, a flicker can become a flame if you don’t douse it too quickly.
5. When you find some hobby you like, ritualize it. To make it a hobby, it has to be more than a habit. Alas, one of the lessons we learn as we get older is—a good habit is easy to break. These days, there are just too many distractions, too many other things to do. If it’s not the TV in every room, it’s the web on your computer and phone that can give you momentary if empty entertainment. Nothing becomes really meaningful, however, unless you repeat it—make a date of it, make an occasion. “Thursday night is film noir Meetup night!” “Every March, I’m going to London!”
6. Make it more. Enhance the experience. Make it your own. Add something to it. If you meet up every Thursday at a friend’s home to watch the film noir, start bringing popcorn (or, if you’re also trying to get fit, some crunchy veggies and hummus). Make it more fun—a different type of popcorn every week, or a new kind of punch.
Make it more. If you’re in a book group, maybe do a half hour of research beforehand and give a mini-report on the author or the early (and misinformed) reviews of the book. Before the Italian lesson, go out to an Italian restaurant, or experiment with making a new kind of pasta. If you’ve started birding, buy a bird book or borrow a new pair of binoculars.
And let’s face it. Nothing makes an occasion more memorable than taking a couple photos and posting them on Facebook or Instagram. You’ll have the pleasure of other people commenting, “Oh, I always wanted to do that!” And in a year, Facebook will repost the photo so you can remember it.
7. If this turns out to be more than just fun—if you find yourself getting passionate—ride that wave! Expand your experience. If you’ve been teaching yourself guitar chords by watching Youtube videos, maybe now you might spend a little money and employ some impoverished music student or old grunge bandmember to tutor you. If you’ve been volunteering at your old school, consider joining a committee or even running for school board.
8. Remember your limitations, however. You don’t want to overload your life and start fretting about what used to be fun. For example, I wanted to help with kids in my sons’ old school, but when I talked to a tutoring organization, I realized that while I was still working and traveling so much, I really couldn’t commit to weekly sessions. So I put that desire aside for later, for when I’m retired. I’ve done enough of the tutoring to know I really want to do it, and I can keep that flame alive until I can really make it more of a passion.
Most important, stick with it long enough to know if it will be meaningful in your life. Many of us have gotten so competent at our jobs, we might get impatient at being beginners again. But if we can get past the awkwardness of being around much younger but more knowledgeable film fans, and if we can persist with the Italian lessons even if we can tell our accent is horrendous, then we will get past that uncomfortable newbie experience and be ready for more easy enjoyment. We really do know how to learn and grow efficiently and effectively, and we’ll probably get better at this pretty fast, if we just… you know… stick with it.
9. But… but really, if it’s not right, if it’s getting less not more fun, try something else. We don’t have endless time to devote ourselves to a pursuit that agonizes us rather than interests us. We know we have a limited store of patience, so why waste it on a group of people who make us anxious and unhappy? If after a few months, it’s still no fun, let it go and try something else. It might help to analyze what you liked and didn’t like (“I liked going on the ski trips, but I didn’t like whole competitive vibe of the group, like you were a loser if you didn’t want to risk your life”) so that you can find a better experience without the negatives.
10. Most of all, open yourself to enjoyment. Put away that hard-earned cynicism (“Everyone can tell we’re amateurs”) and skepticism (“Kids like this will never learn”). Give into the experience. Don’t be self-conscious about your age or the sound of your laugh. Don’t obsess about others’ possible perception of you (“Everyone thinks I’m stupid that I never learned to read music”). You’re grown now. You know that “everyone” isn’t thinking about you, and even if they are, and they’re not thinking positively, their thoughts aren’t worth your time.
You might even have to force it a little, to “act as if.” You don’t want to do that for long—if the “as if” doesn’t become real in a few weeks, this probably isn’t right for you. But sometimes, yeah, you have to fake it till you make it.
Remind yourself—this is just for fun. You’ve been working all your life. You deserve some fun. Audition the experience. It doesn’t have to be life-changing as long as it’s life-opening… but you won’t get either if you don’t try it out for awhile.
Northern Mockingbird
It doesn’t have to be life-changing as long as it’s life-opening… but you won’t get either if you don’t try it out for awhile.