Significance

Michelle and I were driving Kylee to a doctor’s appointment the other day, and on the way there we were trying to complete one of those detailed questionnaires often required with every first visit to a new physician. Michelle rattled off the questions as I drove.

“Head size at birth?”

I stared blankly at Michelle and wondered how many people could quote this about their 11-year-old child, or might actually have it documented somewhere for reference.

“Age at which she started walking?”

We looked at each other with puzzled expressions, and then talked about how we knew it was later than Megan and later than usual for many. But, neither one of us could pinpoint the exact month when Kylee became mobile.

“Age at which she began talking?”

We didn’t have a clue on this one, either. What followed was a long search of our memories as the highway passed by, and a discussion to see if one of us could even remember her first words. I think, if Kylee had asked either one of us alone, we each would have likely been tempted to make up an answer. Michelle would have told her it was “ma ma,” and I would have equally been tempted to say it was “da da.” Should Kylee later corner us for agreement, Michelle and I would be standing there, red-faced and realizing we neither one really knew the truth.

Further questions prompted discussions about what we were recalling, if we had certain details correct, and whether or not we were remembering those details about the right child. I’m pretty sure we had some things about Kylee attributed to Megan, and some of Megan’s raw data and history incorrectly remembered of Kylee.

By the time we were parked, I was beginning to feel like a bad parent who was neglectful of their child because they didn’t diligently, mentally, record these things, or have the ability to quote them with ease. I thought of all those baby books we got as gifts when the girls were born, and how they were incomplete and put away somewhere, collecting dust. Had I only known…

As we were getting out of the car I looked at Kylee, who had been quietly listening to our attempts to sort out the information, and felt a little guilty. I thought maybe I should take her shopping later that day.

The human memory is a funny thing. If I think about it, there are literally millions of moments that have happened in the course of my lifetime. Many of them I forget about soon after, or even immediately after, they happen. Some I can recall with little effort. Others escape me. Memories can even frustrate me because I seem aware of them on some level, but can’t quite fully grasp them or recapture them.

Even stranger: scientists tell us that some of our strongest memories are olfactory related. In other words, we are able to remember odors, or scenes, things, and events we attach them to, for a very long time. We are able to have the mental recall of the sensation of an odor, even when the odor, or whatever causes it, isn’t present.

I know this to be true myself. To this day I can recall the smell of the muddy banks of the Fishing River, a little stream that ran through the small town in which I lived as a boy. We used to slide down those banks and into the stream, and infuriate our parents when we would come home covered from head to toe with mud. It’s been close to forty years since I swam in that creek, but I can still smell it when I think of it today.

I can still smell the sand and soil mix of the town baseball diamond on which I played so many little league games. I was a catcher for all of those years, and pretty darn good at it. I was the only kid in town who was willing to step behind the plate to try to catch the wicked, and sometimes erratic, fastball of my close friend. Remembering the smell of that leather catcher’s mitt is still intoxicating for me.

I remember the smell of my Uncle Ernie’s cabin down at the Lake of the Ozarks. It had that musty smell of a place that never was completely dried out, or that spent days and weeks shuttered closed. Even when all the windows were opened for the days we would spend there, that smell would still linger. It still lingers with me now.

I was thinking of Uncle Ernie’s cabin and the times we all spent at the lake just the other day. I had cause to reminisce about some of the memorable moments of my youth, and the times my father would take us to my uncle’s cabin on the lake for fun-filled summer days with our cousins. They are among my most treasured memories. I’m still able to replay some of those days like an old, 8mm film reel, complete with slightly out-of-focused images of people and places projected on my mentally-blanked screen. I enjoy how those images can engross my focus, and chase away things I would rather not contemplate.

It dawned on me, when I was thinking of all this one day, that what moves something—a moment, an event, a scene—from being simple history to a memory, is the emotion I personally attach to it, either at the time it happens, or later. I think it is the feeling evoked in the remembering, either that same feeling I had at the time, or a new one, that makes it stay with me.

Sure, there have been events I’ve told myself to mark for future reference: novelties, or “firsts” that have happened along the way, or endings. But, these things, in and of themselves, are hollow actions without something to add depth to them. The emotion linked to them is what makes a memory of them, and keeps them permanently indexed in the yellowed and frayed pages of my personal narrative. Things like joy, love, pride, accomplishment, or even fear, or disappointment.

When my life was going through some change a friend once told me that I needed to create new memories with Kylee and Megan, create a new record of the way we live now. I know they weren’t telling me I needed to erase, or crowd out, previous memories, but instead wanted me to understand I should create memories that helped them value and appreciate their new life, just as much as they did before all the changes.

It was good advice, but I believe those things I recall now, from when I was a boy, are not memories anyone ever intentionally gave me. No one, I believe, ever set out to create them for me solely for the sake of making sure I thought well of my life. I only came to value them later. Today they are like small, mental jewels mined up from the layers of rich experiences my life has offered me.

So, I could attempt to give Megan and Kylee all kinds of enjoyable experiences, using every bit of my imagination and every cent of my earnings, but it really wouldn’t matter. What matters most is what surrounds those experiences, the feelings they will later use to frame their recollections. That is what will truly make them stand the test of time.

© 2011 Cody Kilgore. All Rights Reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention. May not be copied or distributed without prior written permission.