There are images that stick in my mind that are so
unimportant I can’t imagine why I remember them. And they stay for decades.
A highschooler in track team uniform puts on a burst of
speed to outrun a friend. That’s it. No beginning and no end. I didn’t know
either of the people.
It’s something like a dream, but I know it wasn’t. I can show
you where I was standing at the time. Besides, dreams can be significant at
some level; this image is meaningless for me. But for whatever reason, the
shutter in my brain snapped at that moment, and the image was recorded
somewhere in its billions of cells.
My uncle is in the Navy, 1943. Visiting us, he goes down the
steps from the street taking his whites to the apartment house basement where
there’s a washing machine.
We’re walking the family dog in an overgrown lot favored by
dog-walkers An exotic-looking butterfly perches on a leaf. To get a closer look
at it, a man hits it with the end of the leash in his hand and destroys it.
A day at the beach with friends. The reflection of the sun
bounces off the water a particular way. I’ve been to the beach hundreds of
times; why do I remember this day? Nothing special happened. Thirty years
earlier, a different beach: a lifeguard gathers half-a-dozen of us kids one
evening and hands out sets of commemorative stamps showing, if I remember this
part right, pictures of state capitols. It’s bizarre; I couldn’t have explained
it even then, but I remember it.
The “snap of the shutter” has to be more than just an
analogy; I think something resembling that must really happen, physically or
chemically. The image is set in just that moment, and it remains. There’s a lot
of research going on today into how the brain works; I’d like to see someone
pick up on this. I’d volunteer to strap on the electrodes.
Does it happen that way to everyone? That would be my guess,
but I could be wired in some strange way. Then, too, I’ve heard that one of the
first signs of dementia is increasingly vivid memory of past events. I think it’s
accompanied by forgetfulness of current ones, but I don’t remember that
happening.
