Memory

October 25, 2022

Memory is fickle. We remember some moments, and others we can’t recall. Why is that?

If we traverse a life of 70 years, that’s 3,640 weeks, 25,550 days, 613,200 hours, 36,780,000 minutes filled with life’s events and memories. I turn 70 today, Oct. 25th — which explains my interest in that timeframe. According to the website Clinical Neurologist Specialists, citing a Scientific American study from 2010, the human brain’s memory capacity is 2.5 petabytes, the equivalent of 2,560 terabytes, or 2.6 million gigabytes. So, how many petabytes, terabytes or gigabytes of information do we process in the course of 70 years? One study says we process up to 74 gigabytes a day, or nearly 2 million gigabytes in 25,550 days. To gauge what 2 million gigabytes means, consider that this MacBook Pro I’m writing on has 1TB of built-in storage, or a mere 1,024 gigabytes. A drop in the bucket. Therefore, apparently the brain is big enough to hold everything we have ever seen, touched, felt, said, and experienced. Then why can’t we remember every passing second in that life?

Okay, okay, you say, I get it. The brain is an amazing apparatus, a wondrous machine stuck on top of our skeletons that does much more than most of us even begin to tap into. Bad on me that I can’t access everything at the drop of a hat.

My point is not to suggest that we should remember everything, because we don’t and we can’t. Nor is it necessary. I don’t need to remember what I had for breakfast on June 13th, 1970 when I was not yet 18 years old. I don’t care, nor would the knowledge add anything to my current experience. That’s reality.

But why are some memories so much more potent than others?

I’m going to tell you some of mine. I hope you will tell me some of yours, too. Here’s the rule: Try to come up with memories that don’t have a photographic backup in your life. Those hard copy artifacts distort the memory of the events they capture — events like a victorious moment in your high school athletic career, your college graduation (god, I look so stoned in those pictures), your wedding, the birth of your first child, the purchase of your first house, your child’s wedding. Those are likely candidates to have been photographed. By the photos’ very existence, your brain’s memory is altered. I’m asking you to search for moments in your memory that exist outside your photographic archives. Do you want to label them peak experiences? Maybe they are. Or maybe they just touched you in some indeterminate way that permits you to summon them without any outside cues.

— A doctor’s office in São Paulo, Brazil where the corner of my eyelid was being stitched up after I, a three year old, tripped and smashed into the pointed corner of a coffee table with the orbital bone of my eye socket.

— Making out with my 19-year-old maid in Campinas, Brazil in a TV room as an almost pubescent 13-year-old boy while my parents stayed at the hospital after my father’s surgery.

— Seeing my someday-to-be wife talking to Jim Downey in the stairwell of my freshman dorm at Harvard.

— Standing in a railroad station in Bolivia as a 20-something, at 1am, high in the altiplano, and being able to read by starlight in an otherwise dark little town.

— Seeing a veil of white light on the JFK ramp leading to the airplane that was taking me to Mexico City in 1978 as a newly-assigned foreign correspondent.

— In 1981, in the dark, standing under a hideous green and orange tarpaulin lashed to the trees on the terrace of the weekend house where I was to be married the next morning, with three of my closest male friends getting ready to help haul it down.

— In a Paris bistro in 1985, watching a waiter clip a thick piece of glass siding on our banquette, and seeing it break in half next to my dinner guest facing me, slam into her head and knock her out.

— Sitting all night in a blond wood paneled birthing room at Lenox Hill hospital in 1989 while Donna labored away without success, and then in the morning hours, hearing the doctor say, she’s in distress, let’s get this baby out.

— My boss walking into my office one morning and saying, how’d you like to work on a cigar magazine.

— In my brother’s intensive care room in Washington D.C. in 1997, with the monitors blinking, the kidney machine pumping, and my sister-in-law and mother and sister standing beside him, looking into his eyes as I was leaving and saying, ‘I’ll see you on the other side.” He died the next morning.

— The moment when Donna had returned from a solo hiking trip in the Canadian Rockies and began to excitedly describe her experience, and my reflexive vision was, me, hurtling off an exposed cliffside trail into the abyss below.

— Standing at the back door of our house in Briarcliff Manor, NY, sticking the key into the door to lock it and breaking down in tears, while Donna and Liz waited in two cars in the driveway as we were leaving to drive to Wooster, Ohio for the start of Liz’s college life.

— As the light was fading in the vacant courtyard of our newly purchased, dilapidated colonial-era house in Queretaro, Mexico, seeing the sunset colors change on the old, white adobe walls and feeling the karma, that “this is the place.”

There are dozens and dozens more “moments” like those, memories that flood my head from time to time when I am feeling nostalgic, like before a 70th birthday.

With the advent of iPhone photo montages, moments without photographic evidence have become rarer. Nonetheless, digging around in your memory is a worthwhile exercise. There is a vast trove of events inside your head, and I believe, or at least suspect, that there is some merit in identifying the ones that have stood the test of time. On momentous birthdays, like a 70th, (well, it feels momentous and a bit overwhelming), it is reassuring to take a look back at where you’ve been, the things you’ve done, and how far you’ve come.

Within those unadulterated memories, there is a life. A life to remember. A life to cherish. A life to celebrate.