As I get older, I find that I lose immediate recall on a number of things. Usually, I will remember…in a short while. But sometimes not. Okay, I can live with delayed recall. That’s not unusual for someone in my advanced years. But what I find truly exasperating is to revive a shared past incident with a friend who cuts me an if-you-say-so look with an apologetic shoulder shrug.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. We may have been in the same place at the same time but we obviously didn’t lock down every detail in the same way. Think witness variations in a trial. But when we do get to remembering a given event, one we shared with a friend, we presume they saw and recalled what we did, in the way that we did. Not so, apparently. There’s a lot of slippage in shared observation.
I think, what we are dealing with is selective recall. When you consider how many memories we’ve accumulated over a long and busy life, no wonder we tend to compress. Our brains can only keep so much information accessible, not to mention prioritized, in our quick recall file. We have so much to attend to: fast-moving daily news, family crises, coffee cup rattling with a neighbor, cross-chat at work, post church head-nodding and the latest baseball score. So, we don’t have a lot of mental space left to file, cozen and retrieve past events.
Which explains why it is so important to connect with our close friends on a regular basis to review, replay and reinvigorate past events as much for their historic value as to keep them alive for ourselves and our progeny—even though they don’t often request such. So, if our grandkids roll their eyes at another grandpa story, we have to be patient. There’s a lot they have to learn.
Like…
1. Life happens quickly in a specific time and place…learned lessons are shared with ‘years ago’ reflections.
2. What happened to us may be very different from what is happening to them.
3. Still, there’s some wisdom that could/should be shared and learned.
4. So, what we really ought to be doing is teaching our progeny to think, to assess, to reflect. Or not. Huh!
Retired trainer, and writing instructor, Joe Novara lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Writings include novels, short stories, a memoir and various poems, plays, anthologies and articles. Read more at https://freefloatingstories.wordpress.com/
