If my Memory Serves me Well

My memories range from vivid to vague. Some have been constants since their first impression and others fleeting, recurring with chance associations brought on by passing sensations; the smell of fresh-cut green Douglas fir lumber for my first built house, the taste of olives on my first visit to Spain, the feeling of the sun on my seven-year-old back, the laughter of a friend when I surprised my self with a clever joke.

I can now be sure that my memories are my own, to do with as I choose, and that I embrace and embellish some and leave others alone, content to let them fade as I recover from their wounds. My hope for my memories of the future is that I will have fully inhabited my experiences for better or worse so that I am ready to meet the people, places and times that remain to me.

I know this has not always been true of my past at the times that I was too attached to my version of the world to see it as it was, or myself as I was.

Memory is a piece of fiction, not always conforming to the facts, but portraying a personal reality- the story I tell myself. I am a revisionist, observing my past through the lens of the present, with aging eyes that must rely on imagination to fill in the details. That imagination is how I create my inner world and the path forward.

I went to a 50th class reunion last year mostly to see my freshman room mate whom I hadn’t seen since but had remembered often. Our mutual curiosity about one another was about our differences and the bonds that occur just for being young and unsure of the future. I came to my freshman year as an over-prepared and privileged preppy and my roommate arrived as a hard-working high school athletic star on scholarship. Mernoy was a black basketball player from Oklahoma who found himself on another planet in Palo Alto where my parents had moved while I had stayed back east at boarding school. I was coming home to a world offered up on a silver platter and Mernoy had just left Tulsa and would send money home to pay the utility bill.

My memory of him is vivid. He was smart and curious and easy to be around. I have often shared the story of how he would bet anyone five dollars (more then than now) that he could spontaneously wake himself within fifteen minutes of any time during the night that the bettor would name. This required the bettor to show up a little before the appointed time to be sure Mernoy was actually asleep. If he was not convinced the bet would be off, but if satisfied he would wait by the bedside to see if the sleeping beauty would wake on time and collect his five bucks. Mernoy always woke up. After a while people stopped betting, but he did make a little change whenever somebody new could be roped in. When I reminded him of the bets 50 years later he said “That’s a good story. but that wasn’t me.”

So much for vivid memories, except that that story entertained me for decades. And who’s to say whose memory failed?

The other story about Mernoy suggests that I was the one getting things wrong. By junior year we had gone our separate ways. He carried on playing basketball and I had been in and out of school and mostly involved in anti Vietnam War activities and trying to decide what to make of unearned privilege. I ran into him outside the student union and asked how things were going. He said he had been passed over on the basketball team and guessed he would be headed to Detroit to work on the assembly line. This struck me as a terrible and cynical use of a talented young man and I filed it away as another instance of things needing to be made right. When I saw him at the reunion I learned that he had finished school (which I hadn’t) and started teaching at a largely black high school and pursued a career that lead to his position as Provost of Arizona State. That is third party verifiably true and proves whose memory endured., although I still think I could have encountered Mernoy at a moment just after a disappointing passage in his career of which he had no memory, having moved on to fulfilling and impressive acheivements.

True or false our memories form our realities that in turn shape our thoughts, feelings and beliefs. I am grateful to have gotten to accept that the stories I tell myself have value as fictions that give some form and purpose to my life, even as their author massages the facts to suit the narrative. So much of meaning is an artifact constructed in retrospect and revised to meet the needs of the moment that I have come to appreciate these stories for themselves, surrendering to the awareness that I just might have it all wrong. But that is all right.

I am setting out to record my memories rather than a memoir because, as slippery as memories can be, they are much more reliable than self perception, which becomes so clouded with aspiration and apology as to be nearly useless as a portrait. When I examine the purposes and motives of my choices I am constantly in doubt as to which were made by me and which were visited upon me. So better to reflect on the people places and things I have encountered and leave the mythology of self to the ages to which they belong. I’ll try to make the stories that follow a little more straight forward.

I have chosen a thousand words thinking that that would be enough but not too many. Also if a picture is worth a thousand words, then why not a story?