Remember What, Exactly?

We are not required to commit much to memory. 

Almost everything can be stored electronically, from the phone numbers in our cell phones to the appointments on our calendars (which, in my case, can be texted to my cell phone as a reminder ten minutes in advance of an event, which drives me nuts, and is a function I must disable, if I can just remember to do so when I have my calendar open). 

There have been times when I have had to flip my phone open just to tell someone how to reach my own daughters. It seems the fact that I do not have to remember something guarantees that I will not remember it. 

This doesn’t reflect its importance; it reflects the fact that I seem to think I get a pass just because I have a computer and a cell phone. Bits of information my mother had to memorize don’t even approach making a permanent impression on my mind today.

Imagine what it must have been like for earlier generations. You had to remember something or write it down, and then you had to remember where you wrote it, and where you put what you wrote it on.

People kept address books, expanding files, notepads, diaries, copy books, data books–and millions of scraps of paper bearing critical information stored in safe places. These are the bits you find in an elderly relative’s desk after her death: must tend to this by 11/4/57!!! or ask Cecelia about that salve.

As you’re tossing these scraps into the wastebasket, you feel a wave of melancholy laced with hope that the deadline was met and Cecelia had the opportunity to tell all she knew. You then smile, because you suddenly understand that these notes weren’t necessary at all; the facts were already stored in the mind of the individual who wrote them, and deeds were done, conversations undertaken, all without much ado, just because she remembered them.

So much depended on memory. Anxiety is the first word that comes to mind, but that is because I react as if today’s life resembles the days when things were held in mind. A person’s life was contained within the person: no electronic tethers or tentacles supported or confined.

Such was the way of the world in an earlier time, and the scale of human life was different. Connections meant family, friends, perhaps coworkers or people you knew from church, instead of 2,419 Facebook friends, some of whom you know you haven’t seen since Dick Tracy’s two-way wristwatch was the farthest point to which you could stretch your imagination. 

I don’t mean to give the past a halo, nor do I mean to reconstruct it. But I am quite positive that in the days when people relied on their memories to get through their daily lives, those daily lives were significantly less complicated than our day-to-day electronically-reinforced whirlwinds seem to be. We remember more because we can, at least electronically; therefore, we are expected to remember more. No wonder we quiver every now and then.

I bring this up because my computer died a slow and whimpering death over the weekend. It was an opportunity to discover at least two things: 1) I couldn’t communicate with anyone whose contact information wasn’t in my cell phone; 2) my handwriting has deteriorated to what Palmer Method Expert Sister Joseph Pierre would have called chicken scratch. It has taken a crashed computer and many, many years of wondering what she meant by that phrase, but I have, at last,   come to an understanding: the chicken scratch is mine.

And the notes I was forced to write by hand over the weekend? If I ever do find them again, will I be able to read them?

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