Memory Pointilism

As fictional television detective Adrianne Monk would say, a great memory is both "a gift and a curse." As someone who has a freakish memory, I live this motto every day.

It's a gift when happy tidbits pop into your mind. Summer, to me, is wrapped up in a short snippet in my mind: I'm about 4, freshly-bathed right before bed, wearing my light blue terrycloth PJs, sitting on a picnic bench in the backyard, watching my two brothers play in the freshly cut grass, while also watching the dusk set in. Not a momentous event, but it sticks in my mind as if it were yesterday.

The word surprise was defined for me two years later. I was in our basement rec room watching TV with my one brother, and my mom called down the stairs and told me to come up. I said, "do I have to?," and she said, "yes," so I did. As I climbed the dark blue carpeted steps, I though it was odd that I could smell my teacher's cologne, but I ignored it. My parents were in the back living room, so I went back, and standing there in her fake fur was my second grade teacher, Mrs. McCleary. I remember just staring at her, wondering what she was doing there, and then her coat moved: in her arms was Brownie the puppy that she had brought to class earlier in the week--the puppy I had begged my parents to have after I was put in charge of taking care of it while it was in our classroom. I grabbed the puppy and sat on the floor, ecstatic that my parents agreed to let us have a second dog--my dog.

Determination in my mind will always be connected to an experience I had when I was a writer for my high school paper. I had just done a brilliant piece about homelessness in Bucks County--actually visiting the homeless women's shelter that I had never even known existed since I could not believe that poverty existed where I did!--a moving piece that showed the humanity of homelessness. The article was going to hit just as "Hands Across America" was occurring, and the junior editor who reviewed the piece re-wrote the entire piece into a crappy "let's do Hands Across Bucks County or have Bucks County Aid like Band Aid" pep rally cheer. My original was hacked to bits, replaced by pep and pom-poms, and in my stubborn teenage mind, that would never do. So I told the teacher-adviser that I didn't want my piece to run as it was revised and that I'd rather throw it in the garbage than be connected to such "trite fluff" (yes, my exact words!). I told Ms. Franke that either it went in as I wrote it, or it went in the trash. The article appeared in the next issue--my original article, with the comma errors fixed. Victory.

These happy moments are numerous and clearly still come to mind often as I go through life, but then there's the other side of Monk's adage: that a good memory is a curse, too. Embarrassment will forever be the moment in French class in 1984 when I had to give an oral speech about a guy fixing his motorcycle, and instead of saying "par" I said "pew" and the popular kids in the class laughed hysterically, with my crush leading the way, holding his nose saying "p.u. is right!" and nearly falling out of his yellow-backed desk/chair combination. This one minute of my educational life still haunts me, even though I have spend millions of minutes in classrooms through K-12 as well as three college degrees. But that one minute is still there, as if it happened earlier today.

Disappointment will be forever branded into my mind as the moment when I asked someone to the senior prom. We worked together, and he was a few years older, but I thought he'd do me this favor so I could go since I didn't get to the sophomore dance or the junior prom. After all, only complete losers didn't go to any of their proms. I was wearing a beige and white striped sweater and matching solid beige sweater skirt (it was the 1980s after all), thinking I looked pretty good and that since he always flirted with me that he would do it. After getting up the nerve to ask him, and convincing myself that this was a lock, he laughed openly and said, "seriously? Can't you find anyone your own age to take you? Won't anyone else be seen with you?" I turned away like a kicked puppy and never brought the subject up again. But the night of the prom, when I was working because everyone else was at the prom, and he was working in the next department only, I realized that the world of romance and happy endings was a pile of crap...something clearly for others but not me.

Gut-wrenching fear is always connected to two moments. First in 1992, when I heard my mother answer the phone and talk to her gynecologist and repeat the word "malignant" about a recent breast biopsy. That huge, icy fist of reality punched me in the stomach and nearly made me sick. Second in 2004, when I heard the ER doctor tell me that my father had terminal brain cancer and only had 6-9 months to live. Again, icy stomach punch. Mom lived, Dad died, life had to go on. But the moments occur again and again without warning.

Just as I could go on forever with positive memories, I could go on forever and a day with the negative ones. And some nights, when it's hard to fall asleep, it's only the negative ones that come to mind: dissolved friendships, embarrassing moments, sad endings, lost loves, and fears of them all happening again and again. It's easy to say, "think of the bright times!!" when you're the one who doesn't have a Monk-like memory, when you're the one who isn't cursed with pessimism...when you're the one in love saying, "winter must be cold for those with no warm memories, and we've already missed the spring." When you're on the bright side of the memory wall. But when both sides of the wall constantly invade your daily life, it's not so easy to see the glass as half full.

So what can I do? What does it mean when all of these memories bombard you day and night, day after day?

When I took an Art History class in college, my instructor introduced us to a fascinating artist and artistic technique: pointillism by Seurat. I remember the instructor lecturing that each dot was it's own work of art, each dot was important in its own right, but that when you put all the dots together, each dot worked in harmony to create a larger picture. So if you stand three inches away from "Picnic in the Park," you see a series of pastel dots, sitting individually next to each other: distinct. When you walk three feet backwards, however, a different picture appears: we are at the picnic at the park with the ladies and their umbrellas. We see the larger picture.

Each time I remember the good times and the bad times, the happy moments and the sad, the moments of elation and those of complete embarrassment, I'm at the picnic in the park. Each time a memory floods into my mind's eye, I'm three inches away from the event: living each moment in isolation with its own significance and influence. And as the memory fades into my daily life, I'm three feet away from that moment observing the larger picture: these memories--good and bad-- paint the portrait of whom I am today. The memories shaped me, and that's just the way it is. I can try to change that, try to forget, but to do that is to forget a piece of what makes me whom I am today. Good or bad, it's just the way it is. True friends accept me as I am; the others try to change me and constantly force me to revise my picnic in the park...but that isn't going to happen.

My memory dots are my memory dots: they've made me cynical, comical, sensitive, helpful, insecure, over-achieving, paranoid, vulnerable, pig-headed, and lots of other things. Accepting me for whom I am may not be a picnic for some, but sometimes the dots give us the whole picture...for better or worse.