Memory

March 28, 2002 and April 10, 2002

Por los caminos del recuerdo
On The Road of Remembrance

“A medida que crecemos pasamos por una seria de experiences que dejan una huella profunda en nuestras vidas.”  Y “por los caminos del recuerdo revivimos memorias de tiempos pasados.  Algunas de estas memorias hacen florecer sonrisas en nuestros labios, otras en cambio nos ponen meloncólicos.”

"As we grow we pass through a series of experiences that leave a profound imprint in our lives." And "on the road of remembrance we relive memories of the past.  Some of these memories make smiles bloom on our lips, others instead leave us melancholy."

En esta tarde de mi vida

todas las imágenes

de los días se perciben

lejanas de memorias

vagabundas:

Marejadas de nostalgias

provocan recuerdos

que sin descuido

penetran rompiendo

la monotonía

de esta tarde mía.

--María R. González

In this evening of my life 
All the images
Of past days are perceived as
Distant idle memories:

Nostalgia swells
Provoking memories
That without trying
Penetrate, breaking
The monotony
Of this evening of mine.

Memory:  "the power or act of remembering; all that one remembers."  
While I was reading Virginia Woolf a few weeks ago, her use of stream of consciousness provoked me to wonder about my own thought patterns and specifically how often I recall past events and memories.  How often do I walk “por los caminos del recuerdo?”  
Our thoughts are constantly drifting back to days of old, days of when, days of youth and innocence.  Memories come and go, ebbing in cycles.  Events once thought forgotten emerge and take us back.  Smells, sights, sounds, and things take us back.  Or sometimes we are just transported for no reason at all to relish in our thoughts.  We play them out again, change them how we will, add details, events, acts, emotions not really there, or we relive them exactly. 

Why do we remember certain things?  What makes us remember and forget?  When do we start remembering events?  My first child is only 7 months old and watching her has me wondering these questions.  Will she remember living in Wisconsin?  What will be her first memory, but then, when will it fade? 

So now I question my thoughts and memories.  What is my earliest memory?  What have I forgotten that if I read about it in a journal or saw it in a photograph, I would remember it again?  
I have realized that I am forgetting things that I once knew.  I am forgetting events and losing memories that I know where once there.  So I began to write them down.  I brainstormed and came up with a huge list of “memories.”  It is a list of sentences, key words, etc. that trigger vivid, or not so vivid any more, and happy or not so happy, memories of my childhood.  Each day it seems that I come up with more.  I am expanding them, writing all I can remember about them, so that I will have a collection of my childhood memories.  It is amazing how one thought leads to another.  Our streams of consciousness are really streams—ebbing and flowing, mixing and leading into something new and once forgotten but which brings freshness and newness of life.

But boy do we mix things up in our memories!  I didn’t know that both those events happened in the same day!!  What time in my life was that?  How old was I?  What were we all doing?  What year was it?  How were we dressed?  What was my size compared to things around me?  I wonder if I visited it again would it be different or the same?  Is my memory true?  
How great will be the day when our minds are opened and we are able to remember all things and remember them as they really were. Or how sad will be the day.  Walking “por los caminos del recuerdo” we remember many things some put smiles on our lips while others can make us very sad.

Living in the past is good and we all do it.  Just like Virginia Woolf has described for us in her books, we all drift back to the past amongst our thinking of the day.  Memories always evoke feelings whether fun, hard, sad, depressing or good.  Was that really I?  I’ve changed so much!!  That seems like a lifetime ago.  See what we have learned and how far we have come. 

Collect your memories now, read and save your journals so that you will have a collection of your memories and you can more easily walk “por los caminos del recuerdo.”