Memories

Liar ! Liar!

Memory is indeed a precious thing.

Memory can also be a liar.

For instance, I thought I remembered being a good and accurate typist. After all, I had stopped in Regina, Saskatchewan, having phoned ahead, to spend a week or ten days at a secretarial college learning the typewriter keyboard. I had been typing on a linotype at my hometown newspaper setting type. That was a very different keyboard and it seemed to have come naturally. And I WAS good at that. Very good. And that skill helped me through university, where I was headed after my Regina stop.

But when I dug out my old file of travel stories I had written on a small portable typewriter I had bought while working in Italy after my North African/Middle East travels, I was shocked to discover that my memory was rather faulty in that regard. Some of the pages looked messy. They had type-overs, words x-ed out, typing mistakes, hand-written corrections and additions… Truly a mess, and no editor anywhere would have accepted a submission looking like that.

This is an example of some of my bad typing: words ex-ed out, scribbled out and written over, etc.

And I constantly find that my memory of a common event and its geographical place is at variance with my fellow travellers, or“memoirists.”

This discovery was jarring for me. And since I am still care giver to my wife, although she is now in a care home, I see, every day, just HOW distressing this is for the the Dementia/Alzheimer’s victim. And yes, I think they are victims. They have been singled out and picked on. They have been brutalized by this dread disease. It is the goodby disease. It changes everything. And, as I wrote in my last blog, we then become our loved one’s memory. Guard it well. Share it often.

For, on the other hand from the devastation of faulty and lost memory, the “lying memory,” memory can, and should, be your friend.

For instance, about those old stories I so badly typed: Those stories are surely more accurate than my current memory of them, having been written more immediately after the experiences. For they are

now distanced by decades of new memories packed into the memory chamber on top of them, squishing them down, compacting the details into tinier and tinier “atoms,” until memory become sketchy and I (we) remember only snatches, vivid mind pictures and “word engravings” of single mental photos taken from the overall event. Sometimes the mind edits them.

After all, that is how memory works. It’s like any muscle—it has to be worked regularly. (But not to the point when, on the umpteenth telling, someone threatens to run you through with a pointed stick.)

So, with these valuable records, my memories are prompted into a more clear, vivid, and accurate…friend. Although, by and large, I’d give myself a good passing grade overall for my past typing.

This page was virtually error free, as was virtually all of my linotype proof pages.

Still, old memories do get fuzzy as we gather so many new ones as we work and play. So, we should document our photos (I plead guilty for not having done this), organize them, file them safely, review them often, share them with each other, and preserve them. Above all, keep on sharing them with your Dementia/Alzheimer’s loved one.

Whenever I do this, Ann smiles and caresses the images of our mutual past, and sometimes she kisses them. Tender, tender moments, indeed. Shared love.

Here’s a wee thing I wrote a few years ago while caring for Ann

Remember Me

Forget me not, for I’m still here
Please don’t fear for me;

Remember me, remember us–
Please don’t make a fuss.

We had good times, remember them–
Remember me, remember us.

So plant a flower, a forget-me-not–
Carry me in your heart.
Remember now, forget me not.

— —

This little poem appears in my little book “Ann, A Tribute” by H. W. Bryce. It is due to appear also in my upcoming book, “Chasing a Butterfly.”