On a bend of a quiet road in the furthest reaches of the most rural New Jersey exurbs of New York City circa 1962 (before 'exurb' was a word), twin boys toddle under a late summer sun in the green grass of their front yard under the watchful gaze of their mother. I am one of those boys. My brother thirteen is the other. My attention is on a toddlery activity. Toy trucks or cars may have been involved, or perhaps just a hole being excavated with sticks or rocks. Whatever it was was interrupted by the approach from across the street of the neighbor woman, in a dress as I recall -- the common uniform of housewives in those days. "Say hello to Mrs Pelagidis," my mother must have said, which I must have done before turning back to whatever had been occupying me and my brother. The play reached a stage at which my brother thirteen assumed controls of the equipment. To entertain myself I turned to observe my mother and Mrs Pelagidis engaged in barely fathomable adult conversation. My mother said something that caused Mrs P to laugh. From my vantage close to the ground, I studied the course of the laugh, from the way it burst involuntarily out of Mrs Pelagidis' red painted lips to the way her mouth reformed to a smile, to the way the smile faded. I remember the thought in my head "How long until the smile from mommy's joke goes away?"
I've held onto that memory for 60 years. I can revisit it at will-- not all of the details are still there, but the progress of that laugh has never decayed. I remember clearly the shape of Mrs P's mouth, the red lips, the whiteness of the teeth that suddenly appeared as they parted reflexively to react to my mother's wittiness, the smile dimples punctuating her cheeks, and after the staccato burst of laughter had stopped, the glacially slow closing of the ruby painted lips ultimately concealing the teeth once again, the lingering tension at the corners of the mouth slowly relaxing long after the drollery that had started the process had been uttered. Perhaps I'd watched the progress of a laugh more than once which is where that sociological question came from. Not only do I remember the smile, but I have a lifetime of memories of remembering the smile.
My first week of Junior High School, my class got a tour of the school library. It was a long sunlit room full of books and tables that took up about half of one side of the corridor of a recently added wing of the school called the 'Annex'. "Does anyone know what 'annex' means?" the librarian asked. Having searched the data storage in my head for a trace of the cool sounding word and come up blank, I scanned the faces of my classmates for evidence of anyone with the answer. The fact that I remember the incident might be an indication that someone knew and that maybe it stung a little that the someone wasn't me. I remember the librarian's clarification of the term: that an annex was an addition, joined onto a main existing structure. News to me. Interesting. In any case, it stuck in my head that in 6th grade, the meaning of the word 'annex' had been beyond me.
Months later, bored out of my mind one day, I resorted to a reliable time-killer, looking through a drawer of saved artwork and writings from over the years and I came across plans I had drawn up 4 years earlier in second grade for building a robot from spare pieces lying around the house. The memory of the ambition came back to me easily. The design called for a bucket for the head, antennae for ears, a sheet of tin for the torso, wheels for feet, and remarkably, for a computer "annexed to the brain". I stared at the word scrawled in pencil with an 8 year old's wobbly penmanship -- "ANNEXED". Had I once (sort of) known the word but forgotten it? What kind of kid knows the word "annexed"? More importantly, where was it when I needed it for the library tour?
Forgetting the right answer is unfortunately not as rare for me as I'd prefer it to be. This past weekend, we had guests over for pie and coffee. The subject of the conversation somehow turned to concerts we'd attended over the years. My wife recounted the incredible story of her parents having the foresight to take her brothers and her to see the Beatles in Memphis at the height of Beatlemania in 1966. She recalled the unsettling sight of her mother screaming along with the teenyboppers. Our guests recalled concerts they'd attended -- Snoop Dogg for one and Chuck Berry for another. I struggled to come up with my own. I remembered seeing Mott the Hoople once. But that was almost sad in retrospect. Struggling to come up with something more impressive, a faint notion tried to light some synapses in my brain: Hadn't my wife and I seen Talking Heads at Pine Knob in the Michigan suburbs for their Speaking in Tongues tour in 1983? It felt like a good possibility, but somehow no matter how hard I tried I could not conjure the image of me and my wife in the audience of a Talking Heads concert. "Did we see Talking Heads?" I tried to ask her over the cacophony of reminiscences of fondly remembered events. She thought for a moment. "Yes we did." she finally said, less than forcefully. I awkwardly tried to leverage her agreement into my own contribution to the conversation, but before I could, it hit me: if I wasn't even sure I had been to the concert, what business did I have using it as a memory to finagle a point for my team in the one-up-manship contest? How could I expect anyone to be impressed when I myself had not been impressed enough to remember it?
This was not the first time I had had trouble confirming my presence at that Talking Heads concert in the suburbs of Detroit some 40 years ago. It's not out of the question that that could be due to the ingestion of memory impairing substances preceding the event, but given my wife's hesitation, it's not clear to me that our notion of attendance at the concert wasn't formed from hearing about someone else's experience of it. Even if we had been there-- and I don't rule it out*-- it could hardly be called a memory. It's more like poorly constructed folklore. The memory of something seems to be an important element of it having happened. Something that evidence could prove happened to me but that I can't remember-- is it a question for history, or is it a zen koan?
My guests barely knew who the Talking Heads were anyway.
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* I don't rule it out even knowing that anyone who remembered it would insist that anyone who had been to that concert would have remembered it. I am representing those who prove that it's possible to forget the unforgettable. (and no one's fault if they do.)
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