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I'm reading "The Art of the Memoir" by Mary Karr. I love reading memoirs, fantasize about writing one someday, but her book talks a lot about memory and its pitfalls. You have to have a good memory, I'm not sure I do! I tend to sugar-coat things, I'm an over-optimist. My brother-in-law remembers SO much from his young childhood. I should tell him about this book. He was an english major anyway, shouldn't he get on this memoir thing?
Clearest as day example: we had an ice storm last month and everybody is hurting themselves. Be careful, friends! My sister destroyed an ankle on ice a few years ago, after multiple surgeries it's almost the same? At my husband's birthday party this year one of our friends thought the ground was safe, but stepped on a metal grate with a totally different coefficient of friction and went down, hurting an arm, a leg, a lot of spots I'm sure, he got up but the look on his face was one of deep trauma.
I was talking to my 14yo about this and asked her, "Did I fall on ice last year? I can't remember. I fell hard. Remember that giant bruise I had on my backside? Was that from ice? All I remember is IMPACT, and then the inability to sit down straight, for weeks! It was kind of a funny story to coworkers and I was always showing you guys my butt because it looked awful!"
She thought for a minute and said "No you got that bruise on the float trip. It wasn't even winter. We hit that tree."
hell, she's right! We were on the river on a raft. I was either really relaxed or dozing off. Totally sober. The weather was lovely, the water out near the Merrimac in Missouri is shallow with just a few fast spots over branches.
Well, one of those fast spots snuck up on us and we slammed into a fallen log and I was flung out the side of the raft and felt myself hit a hard surface HARD. fallen logs must have been just at the surface. I scrambled off to the side but I knew I'd be feeling that one and felt lucky I hadn't fallen in any kind of weirder way. That bruise grew to like 4". I couldn't even wear my comfiest shorts, they weren't long enough to cover it.
how my kid remembered it, when it wasn't even her injury, is a mystery to me. their brains are all faster? or her filing system in that moment was just cleaner? it was just last summer.
Clearest as day example: we had an ice storm last month and everybody is hurting themselves. Be careful, friends! My sister destroyed an ankle on ice a few years ago, after multiple surgeries it's almost the same? At my husband's birthday party this year one of our friends thought the ground was safe, but stepped on a metal grate with a totally different coefficient of friction and went down, hurting an arm, a leg, a lot of spots I'm sure, he got up but the look on his face was one of deep trauma.
I was talking to my 14yo about this and asked her, "Did I fall on ice last year? I can't remember. I fell hard. Remember that giant bruise I had on my backside? Was that from ice? All I remember is IMPACT, and then the inability to sit down straight, for weeks! It was kind of a funny story to coworkers and I was always showing you guys my butt because it looked awful!"
She thought for a minute and said "No you got that bruise on the float trip. It wasn't even winter. We hit that tree."
hell, she's right! We were on the river on a raft. I was either really relaxed or dozing off. Totally sober. The weather was lovely, the water out near the Merrimac in Missouri is shallow with just a few fast spots over branches.
Well, one of those fast spots snuck up on us and we slammed into a fallen log and I was flung out the side of the raft and felt myself hit a hard surface HARD. fallen logs must have been just at the surface. I scrambled off to the side but I knew I'd be feeling that one and felt lucky I hadn't fallen in any kind of weirder way. That bruise grew to like 4". I couldn't even wear my comfiest shorts, they weren't long enough to cover it.
how my kid remembered it, when it wasn't even her injury, is a mystery to me. their brains are all faster? or her filing system in that moment was just cleaner? it was just last summer.