5/23: What I Accomplished Today

Have you ever had a day sort of dovetail and have a theme?

1. I graduated from high school 25 years ago today.

2. Went to Literary Society. The author of The Bill from my Father spoke today; it was a fun book, in an odd way, and he was an excellent speaker.

Since his book was a memoir, both his talk, and my colleague's introduction to it, tended to focus on various aspects of memory. He was asked how he had such specific memories, and he mentioned that this book was published within two weeks of the James Frey incident breaking on Oprah. For example, in a conversation, you may specifically remember that two conversational points were touched on, but they don't flow together, so you might have to generate the conversation between them.

He said he didn't always know if things happened with just exactly the same details that he remembered them as having, or in exactly the same chronology, or maybe with precisely the same causal chain. He was able to "remember" them into a sequence that made logical sense and satisfied him as being true to all the people involved. Is it the actual, precise "factual" sequence? Quien sabe.

Warner Bros. has optioned his book, and in the current version of the screenplay (which may of course change a gamillion times before it's made, if it's made), he's a young blond Gentile heterosexual. And this caused him to wonder: how much of his actual story, or the parts of the story that he considered central or important to himself, would actually be left?

Of course, these are just my recollections of his talk.

3. I came home and ran character #7 through the Children's Week quest sequence. The tailor made a few more Small Silk Packs.

4. My Co-Vivant's visiting uncle left this morning, but another family friend came in from out of town to spend some time with the visiting aunt, so the bunch of us (mother-in-law and visiting aunt, family friend and husband, the Fellas, Co-Vivant's sister and sister's husband, Co-Vivant, and me) had a delightful dinner together. We laughed a lot, and it was really fun.

Some interesting conversations came up. Many friends and relatives have lived with my Co-Vivant's family, some for a few weeks, some for months, some for years, over the 50 years the family has lived in town, and this family friend is among that number; as nearly as I can tell, her parents moved to California when she was a teenager, and she wanted to finish school in town with her friends. (I could have that way off, but of course, I wasn't here.) Anyway, this friend once had tickets to go to a Beatle's concert and offered to take my Co-vivant, who was six years younger than she. Despite her assurances she would look out for Co-vivant, Co-vivant's mother decided that the family friend could go to the concert, but my Co-vivant could not.

The interesting part of that conversation is no one could agree on which concert this was. Was it during the Beatle's first American tour in 1964? If so, Family Friend would have been 13, and Co-Vivant would have been seven. Would it have been a later tour, perhaps in '68 or '69? The latter would have had Family Friend at 18 and Co-Vivant at 12; a more likely scenario, since Family Friend was probably driving. (Just for the record, I'm with my mother-in-law on this; I think 12 is too young for a Beatles' concert. Yes, I am a Beatles' fan. Yes, I understand Beatlemania. I just think 12 is too young. Not that anybody asked.)

Another story that comes up (it always does) is the time when my Co-Vivant's sister fell into the pool when she was about two or three. What happened next varies from person to person. According to family lore, some neighbor named Carol Ann rescued the toddler. According to my Co-Vivant, she, my co-vivant, looked down into the pool (if the sister was two, Co-Vivant would have been eight), saw her sitting at the bottom looking up with enormous eyes, and dived in and got her sister from the bottom of the pool, handing her out of the pool to Carol Ann. She has always been a little (I'm understating) resentful that Carol Ann gets to be the hero of the piece when, from her perspective, Carol Ann was a peripheral figure at best. Now to her brother and sister, this is just another example of their self-involved older sister trying to steal focus and be the hero yet again.

Possible. I think it's a little more complex than that, though.

Let me make what will seem to be a digression, but I don't think it is. A few months ago, my Co-Vivant watched a documentary on the nature of memory. I have two memories that, if they are true, are extraordinarily early recollections, and she asked me to recount them to her again. "In one," I said, "my father had just come in; he hadn't been there for awhile. He had done the right thing and married my mother, but then when I came along, he had a moment of panic; he was a 19-year-old married man, and he wasn't convinced he was done dating, so he left and did some more. Anyway, he was over visiting one night, and he was throwing me in the air and catching me, and I was enjoying it. My mother came into the room and saw this and started panicking. 'Oh, put her down! You're scaring her!' And I remember thinking, 'Oh, Mom, this is fun; leave him alone. I don't want this to stop.'"

"And the other one?"

"I had gotten a little red playsuit for Christmas, like a tiny little Santa Suit, and my mother wanted to take a picture of me in it, so she dressed me in it; there was a hat and everything. However, I didn't sit up very well; one grandfather started calling me 'Eggbutt' because I couldn't sit up for quite awhile, and my grandmother didn't like that, so that grandfather called me "Eggie" until the day he died. Anyway, she'd sit me up and go across the trailer to take my picture, but by the time she was across the room, I'd have tipped over. The first few times, I thought this was funny, but eventually the suit got itchy, and the hat felt weird because I didn't usually have things on my head, and the trailer was hot, and I got a little fussy, so she finally just set some pillows around me so I could stay up and she could take the picture. She didn't like that, because she had wanted me in the green easy chair so she had Christmas colors and the pillows weren't the right color, but she needed them so I wouldn't tip over."

"How old were you?"

"I've seen the picture she took, and I'm about four months old. The other incident would have been a little earlier."

"And when you remember these, what do you see? Where are you in the memory?"

"Erm...I'm in my head, where I live, of course. I'm looking out as me." What a very odd question, I thought.

"So you don't see yourself in the memory?"

"Well, no, how can I see myself? I'm part of it." And according to the show she watched, this means that my memories may be real and not imagined.

She and I have discussed it, and for the sister-in-the-pool story, she doesn't see herself; she sees out as herself. Point of view is often revealing.

When she was little, my Co-Vivant's family had a cleaning lady who was black, and my Co-Vivant remembered asking her why her skin was different when she was three or four or five. The cleaning lady said it was like flowers, and God must like many different colors to make things beautiful. When my mother-in-law tells the story, it's not my Co-Vivant; it's her brother. My Co-Vivant doesn't say anything, however; there's not much point.

My late father-in-law had a strong, unhidden preference for my Co-Vivant. My mother-in-law has a preference she attempts to hide for her son. The three children's late grandmother had a strong, unhidden preference for my Co-Vivant's sister (my mother-in-law announced she was pregnant within a week of the death of this grandmother's youngest son, who seems to have seen the baby as a sort of replacement). Which child did which cute thing often depended on which person you were talking to. In the spring and summer of their childhoods, this worked out okay; neither parent wanted to be blatant in their preferential treatment (which may not always have been conscious), so the three children tended to be treated more or less equally. However, after the third baby was born, the grandmother started wintering with the family. The grandmother had no such compunction; the baby was her special baby, and she would have anything she wanted. Detente was breached; neither parent was going to go against the grandmother, so each of their own pets was at the mercy of the grandmother's.

My Co-Vivant is very conflicted in her memories of this grandmother; on the one hand, this is her grandmother, and she knows she should feel affection for her. On the other hand, this grandmother never had much time for her, spending all her time bonding with her sister, who was quite loud and embarrassing. When the grandmother was in town, the bedroom that had been hers was given over to the grandmother and the baby sister. The grandmother also tended to arrive the week of Co-Vivant's birthday, stealing her thunder. At least one year (it's hard to tell if it was one or more than one; memories are slippery things), it was a week before anyone realized there had been no acknowledgment of Co-Vivant's birthday in the hubbub of Grandma's arrival. We're talking a seven- or eight-year-old little girl whose birthday was forgotten for a week. I find that unfathomable.

My Co-Vivant has "normal" (whatever that means) memory patterns until she's about six; after her sister is born, she loses contiguous memory and has only a snippet here and there. Because she has so few snippets, I tend to believe that the few memories she relays are, in fact, hers. Is that factually the case? Quien sabe.

Another incident came up in which her brother had been utterly humiliated as a teenager. She had leapt to his defense fiercely and told off the jerk who had done it. However, he didn't want to remember this particular incident and was trying to minimize its effect on him (or at least change the subject). She said, "Oh, no, you cried all the way home." He really, really hadn't wanted to be reminded of the whole incident at all or of his response. It was hard to tell if he really hadn't remembered what had happened or if he remembered what had happened and hadn't wanted to go there.

While the visiting uncle was in town, he mentioned having to pay the poll tax when he lived here (he was one of the never-ending list of people who had lived with the family for awhile). My mother-in-law said, "Oh, don't be silly; Nevada never had a poll tax."

My Co-Vivant said, "Actually, while I was going through the records a few years ago, I found receipts labeled 'Poll Tax'; neither you or Dad knew what they were for at the time, but I'll bet that's what they were."

Her brother told a story tonight about packing a suitcase full of books as a little boy and running away from home; he walked around the block and then came back home. "That was me!" she yelled. Now that's not an uncommon occurrence; I did that, too, and I was 2500 miles away at the time (I also did it several years later, as I was younger), so I mentioned that that could have happened to both children (and it probably did). It looked odd to her brother and sister, though, I'm sure; yet another instance, in their minds, of her trying to highjack their memories, while from her perspective, she was just trying to protect one of the few she knew she had.

When I was in high school, I had a sweater, and my mother, sister, and I used to argue about what color it was. I may be misremembering who called it what, but I think I called the sweater "rose," my sister called it "orange," and my mother called it "peach." Now those are distinct, not-usually-confusable colors. I've often wondered: were we all seeing the same color and labeling it differently, or did we actually see the same sweater as different colors? If we had gone to the Sherwin Williams store and gotten sample cards, would we have disagreed which color most matched the sweater, or would we have agreed, but two of us would feel that color was mislabeled?

Whenever I try to evaluate the truth value of statements like that, I find myself thinking about a statistic I read somewhere as a child: every time we inhale, we breathe in millions of molecules Michelangelo would have breathed. Now statistically, I understand the implications here. There are X molecules constituting the atmosphere, and some percentage of X would have been breathed by Michelangelo. Statistically, however, there's no way to tell whether a particular molecule was ever respired by ole Mickey. It's entirely possible that, factually, you may have one breath in which not a single molecule spent the Renaissance in Italy, while maybe one breath you take over the course of your lifetime will be composed entirely of molecules Michelangelo would have breathed. No way of knowing. Can't know the statistics for a particular breath, can't know the statistics for a particular molecule. Heisenberg's uncertainty principal: if we attempt to measure it, the act of measuring itself affects the outcome. There's absolutely no way to know the facts: did my Co-Vivant pull her sister from the pool? Did both my Co-Vivant and her brother run away from home? Because every person available to give data has a filter, acknowledged or no, "objectivity" isn't possible. (I used to think that was what God was going to do when we died, give us the statistics on how often our memories were right, and the people who had the best percentages could go to heaven because they were obviously the most honest. I'm fairly sure I've said it before, and I'll probably say it again: no one is more obsessed with justice and "fairness" than children ages five to eight. Now I rather suspect that "Supreme Being of the Universe" and "Eternal Scorekeeper" are different job descriptions.)



I'm with Eliot here: these fragments I have shorn against my ruin.

5. I was just exhausted, so I went to bed not long after we got home. However, about an hour later, my body informed me it was time to get up. I ran character #8 through the Children's Week quest cycle. Today's BigFishGame is Recyclorama; not bad, but probably not a keeper. Another sorter.

6. Now I will try to go back to sleep.