Kendal View, May-June, 2019

Memories My mother died fifty years ago. About to light her yarzheit candle, I was shocked when I was unable to remember what she looked like. I needed to look at a photo to recall her face. You can imagine this upset me very much. How can such an important memory slip away?

At Kendal we are familiar with memory loss. Usually names go first, then nouns and places.

“I'm having a senior moment.” “It's on the tip of my tongue.” “I'll call you at 2 A.M. when I remember.” But long-term memory seems to survive. I remember the name of my cousin's babysitter's cat. It was “Doughboy.” How is it that I recall such an obscure name and I can't remember the names of a couple who recently moved to Kendal? Of course, there is no one left to confirm that “Doughboy” is correctly identified.

Memories pop up almost unexpectedly. My friend, Beth, bedridden at 93, suddenly became angry with her father. She thought he was disappointed with her because she was a girl and he wanted a boy. Disturbing memories of what he said eighty years ago flooded her and she couldn't get over it, although she hadn't much thought about it before.

Encountering something that conjures associations of an experience that cannot be remembered may lead to déjà vu, the first cousin of nostalgia. Whereas déjà vu is a somewhat disquieting feeling, nostalgia is anchored by happy personal associations, romance, children's achievements. Music is a very strong trigger of nostalgia and can evoke memories and responses even in severely memory-impaired people.

And there are false memories. We used to visit friends every Thanksgiving. A twenty-sixpound-turkey was grilled outside. I distinctly remember their big Newfoundland dog, aptly named “Bear,” snatching the turkey off the grill and running around the backyard with it in his mouth, followed by our friend, grilling fork in hand, trying to catch him. “Bad Bear!” When he finally wrestled it away he whispered, “Nobody needs to know.” Later, everyone said that was the best turkey ever. It was Bear's saliva that gave it special flavor... Never happened? Over the years we had many arguments about whether it did or did not occur. My wife said my memory conflated a similar scene from the Jean Shepard movie A Christmas Story. Could be. Who remembers?

False memories are why police line-up identifications and witness accounts of crimes are often the cause of unfair criminal convictions. Max Wertheimer, the Gestalt psychology theorist, demonstrated that memories actually become altered over time. When shown a picture of an interrupted circle and later asked to draw it, most subjects will draw a complete circle. We tend to fill in the blanks to structure our memories. We pick what we think is the most likely picture, story or face when trying to recall what was the actual one.

Alfred Adler, Freud's contempory, theorized that a person's first memories were a paradigm for later personality traits. My earliest memory was being in my crib with the sides up so I couldn't get out. My parents were in the next room entertaining a guest.

I cried and howled and shook the crib to get attention. False memory? Maybe, but it seems a lot like me today, protesting injustice.

Martin Smolin * * * * 9