Writing Memories

One of my writing friends, a former colleague at NEH, published a beautifully realized recollection of his childhood and early adult life called Battlegrounds of Memory. That always struck me as an apt title for a memoir, perhaps even more so than Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, which suggests, more than struggle, Nabokov's easy confidence in his own prodigious powers of recollection. For, as Julian Barnes observed in Nothing to Be Frightened Of, memories can be very unreliable witnesses of our past. Often we must do battle with them, or at least carefully interrogate and test them, and even then we cannot be sure of their accuracy. Nevertheless, our memories are uniquely our own, even when sometimes we doubt their faithfulness. And perhaps that is why they are so precious to us, because they are so fragile and ephemeral.

When my mother had already begun her long descent into senility, struggling with partial brain damage (after striking her head during a fall) and the onset of Alzheimer's disease, or something very like it, we could still share her memories. Each week when I called to talk with her on the telephone, she couldn't tell me what she'd eaten for breakfast that morning, but she could remember things we'd seen and done together and people we'd known in years gone by. Much later, one of my last attempts at conversation with her came as I was trying to interest her in a book of pictures of the Texas Hill Country. As I slowly turned the pages, suddenly she broke her silence and spoke the word "bluebonnets." It was only one word, the name of a common Texas wildflower she'd seen in one of the photographs we had been looking at, but I sensed that it signaled some memory that had surfaced from that deep well of forgetfulness into which she had fallen.

I'm sure my experience with my mother has been one of my motivations for writing down as much as I can remember of my childhood and youth. It's not so much to preserve my personal history for some unknowable future, as to capture those memories for myself, to recover as much as I can while I am still able. For already it has become a struggle to recall some of the details. When I was younger, I would never have believed that I would forget so much about my own life. But what do we know of years when we are children and young people. Memories are fresh and detailed, and easily recollected for examination and entertainment. It is only later that we begin to realize that some of those details have begun to blur and fade, that faces and names and places are no longer as distinct as they once were. Formerly varied and abundant panoramas have now narrowed; the feature movie of our youthful recollections has disintegrated into a heterogeneous jumble of snapshots.

And so I have been gathering these snapshots, and with the help of what memory aids I can muster, I've begun to stitch them back together into some kind of coherent story of my own past. It takes some effort, but it is effort that brings pleasure, especially when some forgotten piece of the puzzle is located and put back in place, as well as frustration when some essential piece seems to be lost to time. The great memoirs, the ones that become literary works, are those with drama and incident of personal or historical importance, the stories of famous individuals or notable times. But what historian has not wished that some quite ordinary person had bothered to recall what life was like for those whose existence lacked drama or significance as we normally define it? What was life for those who did not make history, but only were forced to endure it?

In any case, lacking a life with either drama or historical significance, I have determined that I shall be content to record the more mundane and ordinary events of a common sort of existence. Who knows, I may perhaps become bored with this myself, but then as those who know me best can attest, I have a very high threshold for boredom, especially when retelling stories of my own past. And so I persist, whenever the mood strikes me, in dredging up my personal history and recording my rather dull and unremarkable story, or my version of it, my reworking of the recollected bits of that history. For me it's not really a battleground, although at times it does seem a bit like work, the kind of work that is most satisfying to the one who is doing it, regardless of the perceived quality of the finished product.