The past few years I've been thinking about memory more and more. What gets retained, and what does not? What drifts away and what finds its way back with a little help from our friends? Lately, too, I've been finding that not only does my memory play tricks on me from time to time, but some things that remain crystal clear in my mind are no-shows in the memories of close friends of mine. Close friends who were right there with me at the time.
Loss of memory with age is to be expected. It comes with the territory. But what I'm talking about here is the loss of various experiences that one would expect to be saved, if not permanent. This may have to do with the emotions felt at the time.
In my introductory psychology classes, I often asked students to think about their first memories. What is your earliest memory? On occasion, there would be a handful of students who can't recall anything before the age of 5 or 6. Conversely, there are a few who recall experiences from their first year of life. Here's where emotion comes into play. Research shows that the emotions tied to various experiences have a big impact on what we remember. Times that were fearful are remembered more easily than those that were not. Trauma, we know, goes deep and can be highly impactful or erased through repression.
Like my peers, as I age, I seem to be focused on events of the past more and more. With retirement, comes some loss of identity, so it seems natural for us to live in that familiar territory as long as we can.
A couple of instances I've experienced in the last few years illustrate what I'm trying to say. Two years ago, at the 50-year reunion of my VISTA Volunteer service, I spent a weekend with people I hadn't seen in decades. Our memories proved a valuable resource, but we found that where some of us remembered precisely the names of people and places, others were lost in the fog. I've always had a fairly good memory, but it is not infallible. On occasion, I find that I have confused two similar but separate things. This seems especially true for names or last names.
My longtime friend Lenny Anderson and I were in a show about Woody Guthrie's life and music for about 10 years in the 70s and 80s. A year or so ago at a music jam we both attend I suggested we do Woody's "66 Highway Blues." Lenny said he had no memory of the song. When I handed him the lyrics, he repeated them but not to the correct tune. How can he not recall a song we did on stage many times, I wondered? Maybe it wasn't important to him, I mused. Then that theory about memory and emotion kicked in. I recalled that I enjoyed doing that tune so much because I had a little bluesy harmonica solo on it. My first such performance. The nervousness I carried to the stage with me the first few times we did the song might have emblazoned it in my memory. Whereas, Lenny did many songs in that performance, songs that were much more challenging too. That may account for why he had no initial memory of the tune.
Recently at our music jam group, Lenny suggested we do "66 Highway Blues." I was pleased and surprised. We fell into our old comfortable routine with guitar and harmonica. Then the others joined in with mandolin, guitar, and fiddle. Never sounded better! Sometimes all that's necessary to jog a memory.
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