Misremembering

For many years now, I’ve been trying to remember old stories from my childhood and about living with my two sisters and parents in the 70s and 80s in Upper Michigan, North Carolina, Southern and Northern Virginia and Iowa.

This process is difficult.

Some people seem to remember exact details about their past experiences. Not me. I hardly remember anything. What I do remember only surfaces as fuzzy fragments that I attempt to reconstruct into coherent stories. I often wonder, how much of what I do remember actually happened to me, and how much of it is based on embellished accounts provided by other family members?

When I began working on recounting and remembering, I was disheartened. What was wrong with me? How come everyone else seemed to remember so many details from their childhood? Now, after reading different accounts of remembering/not remembering/misremembering, I’ve come to realize that most people have difficulty remembering past stories. They just don’t admit or realize it. Memory is complicated and the process of storing and restoring our memories works in ways that often prevent us from accurately remembering what happened to us (or how, why, when, where and with whom). This realization makes me feel better and less alone.

Over the past month, I’ve been reminded of memory’s failures in three different accounts of misremembering:

1. Students’ inability to accurately identify who said/did what in a fake argument Mary Karr performs in class with a colleague, as described in The Art of Memoir.

2. Oliver Sack’s realization in Speak, Memory that a memory he vividly describes and remembers as his own in his memoir was actually his older brother’s.

3. Rebecca Solnit’s confrontation in  The Faraway Nearby with evidence that the photo she thought she remembered of herself in a tree was that of another family member.

Here are a few passages from these accounts that I want to remember and ruminate on:

There is, it seems, no mechanism in the mind or the brain for ensuring the truth, or at least the veridical character, of our recollections. We have no direct access to historical truth, and what we feel or assert to be true depends as much on our imagination as our senses. There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, which is different in every individual to begin with, and differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever they are recollected.

Oliver Sacks

We, as human beings, are landed with memory systems that have fallibilities, frailties, and imperfections—but also great flexibility and creativity. Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength: if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information.

Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified, seen as private, exclusively ours. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.

Oliver Sacks

But there are also memories you dig for: you start with a clear fix on a tiny instant, and pick at every knot until a thin thread comes undone that you can follow back through the mind’s labyrinth to other places. We’ve all interrogated ourselves—It couldn’t have been Christmas because we had shorts on in the snapshot.

Mary Karr

[Solnit discussing the 100 lbs of apricots she received from her mother’s apricot tree] I don’t recall ever eating an apricot from it before the great mounds came to me, though there is a picture of me in my twenties, my feet planted on a couple of bare boughs, pruning shears in hand, looking at ease up there. I wrote that and then went to pull the faded Polaroid out of a box and fount that actually I was standing atop a tall ladder next to the tree with something unrecognizable in my hand. It was my younger brother in the companion snapshot who was standing in the apricot tree itself with the pruning shears. Memory, even in the rest of us [in contrast to Solnit’s mother who has Alzheimers], is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn’t catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don’t exist.

Rebecca Solnit

Archiving/Work Flow Project

Step One: Reflecting

Today I’ve started to think more about my creative process in crafting digital stories and how to archive my photos/video footage from the iPhone. My first step: reflecting on the process.

I like using the iPhone for creating content and, quite frequently, for crafting stories. The iPhone app enables you to quickly edit footage and post it online. I use Vimeo. This easy and fast process has enabled me to generate lots (over 100) short digital moments which capture daily experiences in my life. What I find especially great about this process is that because it’s fairly effortless—it only takes about 5 minutes to edit clips, create a story out of the footage and add sound—it doesn’t take up too much time or overwhelm me with complicated software. And it doesn’t distract me from experiencing life, not just documenting it.

I am realizing, however, that this almost effortless process comes at a price. Because I can just start shooting and quickly editing, I’m not thinking about the creative process (how I’m setting up and constructing my stories) and I’m not thinking about how to archive the photos and video footage that I’m creating for future projects or for others to watch/use. Sure these photos are being stored on iCloud and on my various devices, so they are being archived. But, increasingly, I’m finding Apple’s approach to the cloud and the ways that they control the managing and archiving of photos to make the process tedious, frustrating and often unworkable. Ugh. Don’t get me started on how much I dislike the recent software updates to the iPhone, Photos and iCloud. 

Instead of continuing to complain to STA, my Apple/tech expert, about my frustrations or give up on doing more digital stories, I’ve decided that I need a more deliberate plan on how to build archiving into my storytelling process. It might be more tedious, but since I’m committed to not only telling my stories, but documenting life for future stories/storytellers, I must carefully archive what I’m doing. The first part of my plan is to export the videos and photos that I can access on Photos (from 2012…where’s my earlier stuff?) to a highly organized hard drive, with folders for each year and type of content. This will take some time…

it’s not objective history…

…it’s memory

This morning I listened to most of Mary Karr’s interview with Terry Gross on FRESH AIR. I was particularly struck by this line:

You know, this is my point of view. It’s not objective history. It’s memory, which is a – you know, a faulty form in terms of reportage, but which has the added advantage of showing my interior while something is happening. So hopefully a memoir shows lived experience, not surface reporting.

Mary Karr

Source: Mary Karr on Writing Memoirs

The Yard

For the first time in 10 years, I’m living in a new house. When we moved in last fall, I didn’t pay that much attention to the yard. I noticed that there were trees and grass, but I don’t remember seeing any plants or flowers. Since it was October, most of the vegetation was probably dead or dying. And I wasn’t thinking about the yard; we bought the house for its amazing location, its slightly bigger size and its second bathroom.

So I’ve been pleasantly surprised this spring to witness the re-emergence of gardens in our yard. All sorts of bushes are appearing. And the leaves on the trees are flowering. We even have a pussy willow tree!

Close-up on blooming pussy willow tree. Photo by Room 34
Close-up on blooming pussy willow tree. Photo by Room 34

The gardens, on the boulevard and in the back, front and both sides of our house, are a mystery to me. I know so little about plants and flowers and I have difficulty retaining any information that I’ve encountered. I have uttered, “Is that a weed?” and “Should I pull it or keep it?” a lot this past month. But, even though I sometimes feel overwhelmed and intimidated, I’m delighted to watch these unfamiliar plants grow and to speculate on what they will become as the summer progresses. Will they flower? Are they a weed that will take over? Do they stay all summer? Will they attract butterflies? Will the bunnies devour them?

Sometime soon I hope to craft a digital story about our yard. I envision it as a follow-up to a story about (not) gardening in the yard of my old house:

My 4th Runniversary

Update: I posted an edited version of this story, with voice-over, on Cowbird. Read/listen to it here.

Yesterday marked my fourth year of running. There are so many reasons to celebrate this 4th runniversary: I’m feeling fit and healthy and finally, after two decades of primarily exercising my brain, I’m exercising my body, joyfully using the ridiculous amount of energy that I seem to have. I’ve found a passion that I can share with my husband STA and model for my kids. And, I’m doing something that I know my mom, who died from pancreatic cancer in 2009, would be so proud of and delighted by. She always admired and enjoyed how physical and strong I was as a kid.

While these are all great reasons to celebrate, they aren’t the main reason I celebrated my four years of running yesterday. I celebrated because my ability to run regularly these four years for 30 minutes or more without injury, has enabled me to train for and race in triathlons.

I’ve wanted to do triathlons for as long as I can remember. I grew up watching the Kona Ironman on NBC Sports. I recently found many of these broadcasts on Youtube. Sweet. I didn’t think I’d ever do one myself; the distances were too great and I was mostly a swimmer. But I recall being deeply inspired by the athletes. And somewhere, buried deep within me, I harbored fantasies of doing a triathlon. Probably not an Ironman, but a triathlon of some distance.

After graduating from college and moving out to California in 1996, I bought a book on training for a triathlon. As I read through it, focusing my attention on the running section, I convinced myself that I wouldn’t ever be able to do one. People with crunchy/creaky knees like mine can’t run a 5K, the distance that is required in a sprint triathlon.

Bad knees run in my family. After being on cross country for a few years in high school, my older sister had to have knee surgery and I assumed that, with my knees, I would suffer a similar fate if I tried to run seriously. Whenever I walked up or down stairs, my knees would crunch, almost as if to signal a warning, “Crunch! Don’t even try running! Crunch! You’ll get an injury. Crunch! It will be too painful.”

Throughout my late teens, twenties and early thirties, I thought, and probably said, “I’d like to do triathlons. I’m a good swimmer and I can bike. But I can’t run.” I never questioned the validity of this statement, even though I had run occasionally over the years, for swim team or on my own at the local health club, without any problems.

On June 2nd, 2011, when I tried running again for the first time in decades, I was still haunted by the belief that I could never be a runner. But, I was 37 and I needed to run. I was just beginning to come out of agonizing grief over my mom’s death and was struggling to deal with the end of my academic career. I had to do something deeply physical, not just because my body was falling apart (I had gained weight, was experiencing mysterious back pains and often felt an odd numbness in my feet), but because I wanted to use my energy in joyful and productive ways. And since my husband STA, the self-proclaimed non-athlete, wanted us to try a Couch to 5K app, I decided to give running another chance. I think he knew that I needed to run and that I wouldn’t or couldn’t unless he did it too.

My first run wasn’t pretty, but it felt good to be active again. And, I loved talking with STA about it afterwards. I slowly (very slowly) built up endurance. I struggled with minor pains and an increased sense of vulnerability as the running worked my body—my bones, joints, muscles—in new ways. That first year I was so protective of my knees. “Watch the knees!” I’d yell frantically as my kids, 8 and 5 at the time, ran around me in the living room. I could only imagine ice skating, something I had just started to enjoy again as an adult, with horror. “I can’t ice skate,” I declared. “What if I fall down and hurt my knee?”

But, aside from one tortuous week about two months into my running, when my knee hurt so much that couldn’t run, my body, especially my knees, were okay. I could actually run! And I did, with increased joy and passion.

In my first two years of running, I wasn’t thinking about triathlons at all. Even though there were two big triathlons at my local lake and an indoor tri series at my local gym, I was too focused on running to consider training for anything else.

But…

Every so often I’d think about triathlons. I’d remember how much I’d always wanted to do one. I’d think about signing up for an indoor triathlon at the local YWCA. But, I wouldn’t. I’d think about signing up for an outdoor triathlon at Lake Nokomis. But, I wouldn’t.

Then, one day in early July of 2013, I decided to swim across Lake Nokomis. Once a week, on Tuesdays that year, you could swim across the lake, 600 yards, as many times as you wanted for two hours. I almost didn’t go. But, after some convincing from my ten year old son, I went. I loved it. Shortly after that, I signed up for my first triathlon in August, 2013: the Women’s YWCA Triathlon at Lake Nokomis. It was amazing. That winter I competed in all 4 indoor triathlons at the YWCA. Then, in 2014, I swam all summer and trained for and raced in the YWCA tri again.

This summer, I’m ready to train for and compete in at least three triathlons. I have a new bike and I bought my first wet suit. Slowly, I’m getting serious. I even have a long term goal: to race in the half-Iron in St. George, Utah for my 50th birthday (June, 2024).

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Me on June 2, 2015. At Lake Nokomis, trying out my first ever wetsuit in the freezing (60 degrees?) water.

I love swimming. I love running. I’m learning to love biking. I feel so much joy (some pain too!) and pride as I train for and compete in the triathlons that I always wanted to do, but never thought I could. This joy would never have been possible if I hadn’t taken those first running steps 4 years ago on June 2, 2011.

So, to honor this accomplishment I did what I love doing yesterday. I swam, biked and ran. What a great day!

note: I want to put this story about triathlons beside my past stories about running: