Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.—Cicero
You wouldn’t know it (because how could you), but I have started many posts in this recent quiet period for the Magistry blog. One by one I discarded each of them but couldn’t say exactly why.
Oh, some just weren’t worth your while. I wrote what I thought was a clever rant about Trump, for example, that was just plain boring—because reading and writing about him is boring. He’s boring. I started to write about how Kurt Vonnegut saw all of this coming. But that too felt uninteresting because it concerned the same sad individual. And I couldn’t do that to Kurt. In one post I was sure I would publish, I compared the grind of putting our house back together after a major remodeling project to swimming back to shore, but using ocean-as-metaphor gets you kicked out of the Writers Club if they find out. So I deep-sixed it.
Only now do I realize what the problem was: While the house was in disarray—our whole first floor was either packed up or shoved into our mudroom, where we ate and watched TV for six months—all sightlines changed, and everything I’ve remembered in the four short years we’ve lived here changed as well.
I forgot what the blank white walls in our hallway looked like where there is now tan-and-cream floral wallpaper of Scandinavian design. I can’t recall what was standing in front of a wall where currently there is an empty TV bench piled high with tools, empty jars, broken window parts, and a box of winter gloves. Because our kitchen and dining area swapped places, it’s hard to remember exactly how it felt to stand in either room. In fact, that’s true of almost every space in the house.
In other words, my memories became shuffled like a deck of cards rearranged, mixed up, and only now am I beginning to unshuffle them.
This may sound like a typical reaction to remodeling, but I think there is more to memory than we give it credit for. Much of what we do on any given day is built on memory. I drive my car the way I remember to drive. I don’t learn anew how to shave every morning—it’s memory that splashes on the after shave. My wife and I have a hundred or a thousand rituals and phrases we use throughout the day, all built on memory, from one of us thanking the other in the morning for making coffee to the sequence in which we turn out the lights when we go to bed. (It’s the sound of Janice closing her book and folding her eyeglasses that signals lights out.) It may be love that binds us together, but it is memory that strengthens the bond as it deepens through the years.
Seen this way, memory is not just about learning or recollection—it is the ground upon which we walk. Perhaps that is why change, sudden or gradual, can knock us off our rhythm so easily. When we lose the familiar, we lose our bearings. We lose our sightlines. Maybe we even lose ourselves. As Janice and I put our house back together and create new sightlines, it is as if we are unshuffling the memories we had and adding new ones to create a new order, and in so doing, become new ourselves. And so now I know: I struggled to write during this period because I didn’t know who was writing to you, and that didn’t feel honest—and writing is, above all, about honesty.
Our memories are our one true possession, something (and maybe the only thing) no one can take away from us. We are free to do with them as we wish, but sometimes the shuffling of memories is beyond our control. When we feel lost, off-kilter, or, as in my case, oddly non-productive, we might ask, how is it with my memories? Like anyone or anything else we love, they are not some static things to pick up and put down. They live, and they breathe. And although logic tells us memory is about what was, maybe it is more helpful to see memory as much more about what is, and what will be.