Uncovered Memories

Folks argue about whether therapists can help their clients recover suppressed memories.  I can understand that argument.  Memory is as slippery as I am told eels are.

By way of illustration, I offer two bits from my own memory (and yes the italicizing is purposeful):

• Of a family trip to Williamsburg, Washington, DC, and New York, I remember this: driving around DC at night, looking at lit memorials.  "Look, children!" my mother would say and point.  And we three in the back seat would look.  I was on the left side and the memorials were always on the right.  At one -- perhaps the Jefferson or the Lincoln, it doesn't matter which -- my mother said "Look!" and everyone else dutifully looked.  I said, "I'm looking out my own window."  I was 6 or 7, it doesn't matter which.  What does matter is that I'm not sure I really remember this bit of cleverness (or cheekiness) or whether I remember the reconstruction of this event, told at the dining room table over many evenings of long teasing, always ending with one of my brothers saying, "She's looking out her own window!"

• Of an Alabama State Fair, I remember this: my father's chicken Sweet Lips.  She was featured as a remarkable oddity of fowl.  She could be mesmerized into paralysis in much the same way an alligator can, only instead of stroking her stomach, one made her watch a finger trace a long line out in front of her beaked head.  Do I remember this event or only my brothers' stories about her?  Do I really remember Sweet Lips at all?  For sure, I remember Joe Rumore, Birmingham's most famous radio DJ, and this photo shows him and a chicken that might be Sweet Lips, according to my brother who found it in a book in the Mountain Brook library. 

Anyway, back to memory and its slipperiness.  

My great-nieces and great-nephew are young yet -- ranging in age from 4 to almost 8.  When we laugh and talk and remember last Christmas or that one day when . . . , I wonder: what will they remember from these precious years?  

May they long have someone to remind them of what they forget.