Day in Country: Memory upgrade
By PAT WICK
© Another Day in the Country
The computer is a marvelous tool, but nothing compared to the brain! With last night's little power outage, this poor old computer that I'm typing on is about to have a nervous breakdown attempting to reboot itself. It's sending me all kinds of messages about illegal shutdowns, inappropriate closures, and lack of memory space. I know the feeling.
Wouldn't it be nice if — like computers — we could get ourselves a brain upgrade when the old memory bank got overloaded? I'll apply. It's flat embarrassing to draw a blank on someone whose name I thought I knew almost as well as my own. Gone, it's just gone. I've discovered, however, that if I have a little patience and a lot of confidence in the old machinery and just sit back for a minute and let the hardware catch up with the software, the name will come floating up on the screen of my mind.
However, my memory is absolutely nothing in comparison to my aunt's and uncle's. Both are well over 80. The other evening my 96-year-old aunt and her 88-year-old brother sat at our table looking at old pictures and naming off the year they were taken. "That would be 1924," Aunt Anna said, and Uncle Hank agreed and began to name off the people who were standing there in the photograph looking at us through time.
At one point they did condescend to use a magnifying glass, but that was their only prop as name after name was recalled.
"Now that's his wife there," my uncle said, "What was her name?"
"She was a Riffel girl," chimes in Aunt Anna.
These two sat at the table while the rest of us watched and reveled in their recall, scribbling notes so that we could remember this next week — let alone in 40 years. These aunts and uncles of mine are walking history books, and their ability to remember full names and specific dates boggles my mind.
The family stories surface at the most unexpected times. The other day we were driving back from my uncle's appointment with minor surgery when something jogged his memory.
"It must have been around 1927," he began, "when a minister who had married an older cousin of ours came to visit from Wisconsin.
"He wanted to go hunting, so Dad let him use our old muzzleloader. It was an old-time gun that you had to put the powder in, add shot, and stomp it down with a wad. Dad sent me and my brother Al along with this guy to load the shot for him.
"We tramped around the fields all day hunting jackrabbits, and we were hot and tired. Not only did we have to carry the gun, but the rabbits, too.
"Finally, Al said, 'we're gonna fix him.' When he loaded the gun he put a bunch of extra powder in and stuffed her real tight. Next time the Rev. Maas pulled the trigger — blam! It about knocked him into the next county!
"And the reverend said, 'Let's call it a day.' It worked!"
Uncle Hank tells the story with a laugh, remembering the incident as if it were yesterday instead of 75 years ago.
By contrast to these auspicious and memory-retentive relatives of mine, who recall birth dates, weddings, and confirmations, I find it tricky to remember specific years of my own history — let alone the whole family. I have to stop and figure dates out in comparison to some fixed point.
I do know the year my folks married, my birth, my sister's birth, graduation from high school, wedding, and first move: 1936, 1937, 1950, 1955, 1957, 1959. After that it becomes a blur of moving vans and strange towns. My daughters' birth dates are on instant recall: 1964 and 1969. The date of their college graduation is foggy, but I remember my own by how old I was at the time — 47. Let's see, that would have been in 1985.
There's a plaque on our house here in Ramona reminding me that we bought it in 1990. In 1991 I finished grad school, and in 1995 we spent the summer in Ramona and vowed to live here a whole year at some future date. It took the 2000 millennium to make that dream come true.
And now, it's another day in the country, 2002. We're still here. I'm so amazed at how time flies. I must remember to remember to enjoy every minute.
