Dazed, Confused
I get up at four-thirty in the morning. No matter how close the date may be to the summer solstice, the sun will never rise before me.
I see the dawn at five-thirty as I go out to wait for the bus, and I see it again at six-fifteen, when I exit the Metro.
If I work my usual day and do not go out to lunch, I do not see the sun again until I leave work at five-thirty.
Throughout the day, I routinely greet people with “Good Morning,” whether or not it is truly morning.
“Good morning,” I say, grinning stupidly as I greet a colleague. The time is five-thirty in the evening and I am leaving the building.
I spend my work day poring over the recollections of the aged and dead. Folklorists call these pitiful leftovers “oral histories.” By pitiful leftovers I mean only their recollections, not the aged and dead themselves.
“In January 1940, we packed up the Ford coupe and headed for Little Rock…”
What were you wearing that day?
“I don’t remember.”
What was the weather like?
“I don’t rightly recall.”
Did you stop anywhere along the way?
“The answer to that escapes me.”
Anything interesting happen on that trip?
“Not that I can remember.”
So little remains after sixty-five years. We remember in generalities. We remember that in January 1940 (give or take a month, or maybe it was in ‘39, or maybe ‘42) we packed up the old Ford coupe and headed for Little Rock.
If some writer were to write a narrative of our days based solely on our memories, it would be a very short story, and very likely a total lie. I don’t believe we remember anything. Our memories are as much fiction as fact.
People recall incidents differently, and who is to say whose account is accurate? In the end, all that remains are the memories we believe.
Mom says, “Do you remember us going up to Uncle Millard’s farm in Ohio? You were about Brendan’s age, and remember that was the last time I rode a motorcycle because I lost control with you on board and we ran through a barb wire fence.”
I say, “Mom, I remember it, but I had to have been older than four. I remember it too clearly to have been only four. I remember I rode all the way up there to the farm in the back of a pickup. We’d be arrested for that today.”
Mom says, “Yes, that’s right, it was your Dad’s old green Datsun pickup, and we lived in Belpre at that time, and you couldn’t have been more than four.”
I say, “Mom, how could I remember something so well when I was only four at the time? I remember Uncle Millard teaching me to milk the cows, and I remember his daughter Penny sitting on the porch and smiling…how could I remember her name after twenty-five years?”
Mom says, “I don’t know, but you were only four. And Stella helped Aunt Vick take the pigs to the stock yards, and they didn’t have a truck available so they put the pigs in the trunk of the car and they suffocated by the time they got to the stock yards.”
I say, “Yeah, I remember that, too. I remember almost everything about that trip.”
Mom says, “We had such fun!”
I say, “Maybe we took two trips and it was the later trip that I remember.”
Mom says, “No, we went there once when you were four years old. Loaded up that old green Datsun of your Dad’s…”
I say, “Mom, that would have been 1977. I just find it hard to believe I’d remember something so well from 1977.”
Mom says, “It’s true, though. We had such a good time, it just stuck in your memory.”
Through arguing, I say, “Maybe you’re right.”
How much do I remember anyway? Just incidents, now mostly words rather than imagery. I can remember what I was wearing on the day I milked the cows. I was wearing blue running shorts and a Spiderman tank top. But I remember that only because there exists a picture of the milking, somewhere. If I could find that picture, I could prove to Mom I was much older than four. I haven’t seen it in probably fifteen years myself, however. So maybe I am the one recollecting incorrectly.
And what good would it do?
Mom is the kind of mother who has all sorts of memories about me as a child that don’t square with my own memories.
Mom insists I was a naughty boy in school and was routinely paddled by the Principal, Mr. Barker. I remember spending time in the office, but I don’t remember any paddlings. I think paddling was outlawed by the time I started school in 1978.
Nonetheless, my second grade teacher, Mrs. Spurlock, had an enormous wooden paddle that hung above her chalkboard. She said this was the paddle she once used on naughty children. The implicit threat of it hanging there above the ABCs was that she might use it again.
“Mom, no one ever paddled me when I was a kid except you.”
Mom says, “Oh you’re wrong there, Mister. I don’t know how many times I got a call from Mr. Barker asking permission to give you a spanking.”
“For what?” I say.
“Well, I don’t remember,” Mom says.
I say, “Mom, Mr. Barker never spanked me. You were the one who spanked me when I was a kid.”
Mom says, “Oh, I did not.”
I remember her spanking me quite often. I remember once we were at the department store where my Dad worked as an assistant manager, and I begged once too often for a quarter for the toy machines in the lobby.
When we got home to our trailer, Mom made me pull down my pants and bend over her bed. She didn’t use a paddle on me. She used a wide, brown belt with a heavy buckle on it such as I suppose women wore in the seventies. She ran the loose end of the belt through the buckle and took it up to its last notch. Then she lit into my bare bum with barely controlled fury. Nothing stings like that.
I didn’t beg for quarters for the toy machines anymore.
But for many years, when I wanted to hate my mother, I would bring out the memory of that beating and hold it in my mind’s eye and hate her.
Once, I asked Mom if she remembered that incident.
She said, “No, I don’t ever remember spanking you. I don’t know what you could be thinking of.”
What we recall in the end is so little. Like the child’s rhyme says, life seems but a dream. Sixty years can pass in the blinking of an eye, and then we are gone and what remains? Nothing.
When the elderly talk about the past, their stories often seem over-rehearsed. They long ago created the story in their mind, and they have told it over and over to whomever would listen. If it is not true, well it is true to them. But am I so different? The story I have made of my life is as much a lie as any old man’s war story.
Take the story of the spanking I just told. The elements I choose to leave out are probably more telling than what I actually told you. What if I describe the feel of cold leather stinging against my ass, what would you think then? What if I use the word ass, as opposed to bum or butt? Why did I choose to use bum at first? Because bum is suggestive of 19th century English pornography, such as The Pearl perhaps? What if I mention that it was in the evening, and Mom purposefully closed the curtains; and as she whipped me, sunlight like death filtered through deep, retro yellow drapes and suffused the bedroom in a dim glow? What would you think? Was Mom really exhibiting “barely controlled fury” as she beat me with the belt?
I don’t know. But this is the story I’ve created, you see. I don’t know if it really happened that way or not. Maybe Mom was right and she never spanked me at all. Or at least not often, as she said at first.
Maybe that memory is mostly made up, just something I have come to believe. Maybe it’s a misunderstanding, like most of our beliefs.
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Great blog, buddy, and troubling. You’re talking about the problem of epistemology and even worse: whether we can ever really “meet” or “know” each other through the clowd of confusions that we are made of.
I can’t remember, you’ve seen Memento, right? The same sort of questions motivate that film.
Comment by Todd — Tuesday, 31 May 2005 @ 9:56 pm
Wow. I’ve spent most of the last 25 years considering the transformation of memory. I think you hit it on the head: fact=fiction when we consider our lives. I could see the belt. Something happened. I discovered that the truest things I ever wrote about my family were fiction. My sister read one of my stories and told me I could never write about our family again. I’ve recently been trying to rehabilitate the memory of my poor mad grandmother. She taught me how to bake; she was a great baker. But her daughter and my siblings have wiped out that memory with the one of grandmom chasing my sister around the table with a butcher knife. Both happened; same insane woman. It’s like my sainted father. The man had a hair-trigger temper. Famous explosions, but he died and now he’s this perfectly lovely other person that I didn’t know. Hold on. Write all the memories you can remember. Embroider, implode, unearth. The sun will keep coming in those curtains.
Comment by Lisle — Tuesday, 31 May 2005 @ 10:03 pm
I watched maybe the first hour of “Memento,” but grew bored with it pretty quickly. I never finished it. I did not really have anything in mind when I wrote this. On my break at work today, I was drinking a cup of tea, and I started to recall a conversation I had with my mother this weekend on the telephone. Usually, conversations with her are taken up with her feeling sorry for herself and wheedling comfort out of me for a half-hour. But for some reason this time, she started talking about the past. I believe she is incorrect abut how young I was when we visited that farm. but what do I know? It started me remembering other instances in which our memories differed concerning events that had happened to both of us.
One of the many things I remember about that trailer were the goldenrod-colored drapes that hung in my parents’ bedroom. They were very heavy and kept the room darkened much of the time, but direct sunlight in the evenings turned the room to a glowing topaz color. Strangely, when my wife and I were looking for curtains for our bedroom, I chose drapes that I now recognize as being similar to those drapes in my parents’ bedroom. My wife agreed to them because they have a retro seventies look and feel which she likes. They do not quite cast the same glow over the room, however. But perhaps that glow is all in my mind, too.
Comment by Matthew — Tuesday, 31 May 2005 @ 10:29 pm
A wonderful meditation on memory. I’m again reminded of Patricia Hampl’s brilliant essay about her first piano lesson which I love to teach, and of the many family stories I (or others) recall just a touch differently. Like the one I once wrote a story about where my Dad gets out of our green Plymouth Valiant on a cool summer night in Colorado, and taunts the rattlesnakes on the highway, only to capture two and put them in a flimsy Saltines box, then put them in the backseat of the car between my sister and my. I still recall them rattling, still recall pulling my legs up on the seat, still recall them being alive and Dad killing them in the Motel 6 parking lot.
“Your dad wouldn’t have put you in any danger,” my mom says. “He killed them first.” But I don’t remember it that way; for whatever reason, I must believe the snakes were alive, that my father would act as I recall him acting. To make sense of my father, to make a coherent story about who he is and who I am in relationship to him, I must cling to my version as the true one. And even if it is not factual, at heart, my version is true.
Lately (ever since Linda and I had our boys), Dad’s been obsessed with retelling a particular story which can’t possibly be true, though my mom’s given up correcting him since he narrows his eyes at her and says her memory’s going when she does.
In this story, I, still a baby, am eating mashed potatoes. It’s a Sunday afternoon and Dad’s parents are visiting. Suddenly, I start to choke, and Dad grabs me up from my highchair and whacks me hard on the back (he demonstrates how, his hand hitting the air) and the mashed potatoes come flying out and I’m ok and Dad doesn’t have to be scared anymore.
Only it couldn’t have been me, my mom says, but had to have been Linda because Grandma and Grandpa were visiting shortly after my birth. My mom can pretty convincingly show why it was Linda, but Dad continues to insist otherwise. Does that say anything about how he perceives our relationship, or is it just faulty memory for no reason? Maybe my mom’s got it wrong, but I believe her version more.
Maybe I just don’t want to hold in my head an image of my father snatching me up and hitting me on the back like that, even if it was to help me. Maybe other memories of Dad going balistic when one of us got hurt and me being more scared by his reaction than what actually happened make me not want to be the centerpiece of this story too.
Comment by Dawn — Wednesday, 1 June 2005 @ 5:06 pm
This was such a great read. A few thoughts:
My earliest memory is indeed when I was 4 years old. I remember my little brother being born. I remember my dad taking me to the hospital and the nurses wheeling a little portable staircase to the nursery window so I could climb up and look at the new baby. I’ve told my father about this earliest memory and I have to say I believe that it’s true. The birth of my brother who is in fact 4 years younger than me is hard to argue.
I didn’t enter school until 1980 and I distinctly remember seeing paddlings in the school hallways. Of course, I grew up in a tiny farm town in Indiana. So maybe that’s not the greatest point. They were always about 5 years behind the times.
I’ve seen “Memento” and it’s one of my favorite “thinking” movies because it forces you to discover the facts (or what you think they are) at the same pace as the main character, Leonard Shelby. So many movies clue in the viewers to what’s going on and you’re just waiting for the main character to figure it out. Not this one. It really made me think about memories.
My older brother used to tell stories. We used to say he exaggerated a lot. Quietly, I thought he was just a big liar when I was younger. He would be sitting with all of us at the kitchen table and telling this story about some event. And even though he KNEW that half of us in the room had been there for this particular story, he added in details to make it funnier, more interesting, or whatever. Later in life though, I realized that he believed these details were absolutely true.
I used to write short stories. And I still keep journals. Sometimes, I look at those old journals and I’ve noticed that sometimes…just sometimes…I’ve written an account of an event or conversation that didn’t quite strike so true with me years later. Maybe I was upset when I wrote it. Maybe I meant it to be fictional instead of an account of a true event. Maybe it was just a twist. I don’t know. But what kind of scares me is that sometimes when I read those entries, I find myself questioning what REALLY happened.
I believe you can make yourself believe anything. Memories are what you make of them. And you are absolutely right. Everyone has a different account of things. A different perception. But that’s what makes it all so very interesting.
Comment by shel — Wednesday, 1 June 2005 @ 5:50 pm
It’s entirely possible that the principal still spanked kids at my elementary school in the late seventies, early eighties. I’m not ruling it out, because Point Pleasant, West Virginia, at that time is probably comparable to your tiny farm town in Indiana. I just don’t think I was ever paddled. I have no memory of that, and I think it is something I would remember. Mom says it is true, though.
Comment by Matthew — Wednesday, 1 June 2005 @ 7:21 pm
These are some interesting observations that we are sharing, which reminds me of my studies in existentialism as an undergraduate. This tread reinforces how no two people experience an event the same way.
I began school in 1980 in California and do not remember the paddle. I do remember, however, the whips I would get with my dad’s leather belt. As I recall, that seemed to have happened rather frequently as a child. My parents insist that the whips only occured a couple of times and knowing my parents as an adult, they may be right. But, it is still the way I remember it.
Comment by Brandi — Wednesday, 1 June 2005 @ 10:17 pm
It may be that what we both remember as “[happening] rather frequently” to us may have in reality only happened a few times. I think corporal punishment is so traumatic, in the child’s memory the event grows significantly out of proportion to the actual incident.
It could be, too, that our parents feel such guilt over it that they have repressed how often they actually flew off the handle.
Comment by Matthew — Thursday, 2 June 2005 @ 10:25 am
Interesting reflections from everyone. On the daylight part of the entry, I often feel like I operate in a different time than everyone else. I drive to work in the day, but get home at dark. It’s like I have a nighttime existence, even though I am free to go about errands and sightseeing during the day. And there are no windows near my desk, so I never know when it actually gets dark. It’s just an odd feeling, even after four years, to go home in the dark.
On memory… my father remembers less and less of my childhood, though I am his oldest child, and arguably the one he should and does remember better. I try to ask him about incidents I barely remember, and he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I’m convinced that’s because he doesn’t have the reinforcement of another adult’s memories, those of my mother, to bolster him. The only thing that keeps him telling the same stories — about how I ran around without a shirt as a 4-year-old eating onions out of the garden (I hate them now) or how as an infant, I had spread feces all over myself and the bddroom… — is that these stories were told many times by both my father and my mother when she was alive. My dad can’t tell me many other things from my childhood. And that’s sad.
On the punishment level, I try not to dwell very much on my dad’s hardness as the punisher. He too used the belt, and I didn’t even like to talk about it. It was called a strapping. You lived in fear of the strapping. My mother used it as a bargaining chip, and my father was the absent parent, called upon when he wasn’t sleeping or staying apart from the children, to punish.
I don’t like to think about those times, because I’m quite resentful, and because I have a good, friendly relationship with my father these days. To remember him strapping me brings back the helpless anger I felt as a child, often being punished too harshly simply because my parents had no other way to deal with bad behavior.
As I grew older, grounding became a better solution (or taking my cds, and snapping one of them in front of me), but I think my last strapping was still when I was 13 or 14. Another hated punishment was standing on the doorknob. I reached 6 feet by the time I was 15 or 16. I’m not sure if I was still on the doorknob by that point, but even at the 5′10″ of a 13-year-old, it still becomes painful to bend down, with your nose to the knob, and stand there for a half hour or more with your hands behind your back.
I guess I could describe the fake wood tile at my feet, or the battered, hollow brown door, or the tattered green vinyl loveseat to my left. And my mom’s everpresent pile of junk on it, behind it, spilling all around the room.
But I also try not to dwell on those days, because it evokes the unhappiness and anger I try to put behind me.
Comment by Mel B. — Thursday, 2 June 2005 @ 4:58 pm
Mel, thank you for sharing this memories with us. I am sure that it may have been uncomfortable for you.
Comment by Brandi — Friday, 3 June 2005 @ 3:52 pm
I want to learn more how to write through memory, especially those ‘lost’ memories–the ones I was never told or the ones that I’ve succeeded to bury. There are years of my post-high school life I struggle to recall with any detail. I want to let myself walk the road of memory and recover what’s been covered by denial and fear. I don’t want to be afraid to uncover what’s hiding; I don’t want it to have a hold over me, make me sheepish of facing it. I think I’m more afriad of what I don’t remember, of what might have happened that I buried rather than what stands out. And I’ve started writing about some taboo topics, though it’ll take awhile before I share them in any public space.
I wouldn’t always consider what I uncover–in my own experience and that of my family members (distant and near)–as truth but as impressions of living, multiple castings of a footprint, each casting to capture varied pressure exerted by foot parts. I’ve made designs to research some archives for family history ‘facts’, but what actually happened around those facts are what constitutes memory, and the memory that I construct for those event-facts will never be so-called truth.
I’ve found in my recovery process from damaging experiences–from childhood and later–that to dwell on the past is not a healthy goal. But I’ve found ways of grappling with the past that has helped me make amends with people who’ve harmed me. This peace is more so in my own mind, though sometimes it’s required confronting someone. But it’s learning how to face demons and subdue them, to live with them having happened but not letting them demonize anymore.
I think it matters what we do with memory. Like, Matthew, holding that memory of your mom beating you achieved a certain end–it fostered a certain feeling toward your mom. I think when we hold to one part of memory, whether more positive or negative, that we impede other memories, that we simplify our sense of an experience. This is what I was challenged to figure out in writing about my grandma: how could I capture a complex imprint of her, my impression of her and our relationship? How could I include the experience of her dis-inheriting me without demonizing her? How could I reflect on her nearing death while conveying the vitality that she still exudes?
Some writers that help me with writing memory: Anais Nin, Susan Griffith (espectially A Chorus of Stones), Gloria Anzaldua, Richard Rodriguez.
Comment by wadulisi — Sunday, 5 June 2005 @ 6:51 am