For much of the past two years, I’ve been working on writing a memoir about boyhood. The work has not proceeded smoothly, but rather by fits and starts. A scene here, a character there, now and then a recollected incident, followed by a week or two of maddening blankness.
Most of the summer passed with little progress. For several weeks I sat around recovering from a broken ankle and second-guessing my efforts. Maybe the whole idea was foolish. Maybe I’d waited too long before starting; whole chunks of childhood seem to have melted away, like arctic ice floes in an ever-warming world.
Then came a letter from a friend in England, herself a writer with several published novels to her credit, telling me about an interesting insight regarding memory. Seems some recent experiments about consciousness and perception uncovered a strange but significant fact.
“Apparently,” wrote my friend, “just writing the words ‘I remember’ is a way of bringing up memories. It’s not enough to say it, or to type it, but with pen on paper, it’s reputed to be infallible. I thought about your current book and wondered if this would be worth trying if you get stuck.”
Skeptical—but willing to try most anything—I gave it a whirl. At first it merely felt peculiar. I’m used to composing sentences on the computer keyboard, not on a sheet of paper. Over the years, from lack of use, my penmanship’s grown almost illegible. But a strange thing happened.
When I wrote down “I remember,” my pen seemed to want to keep going of its own accord: “I remember the time we were fishing at the Broken Down Bridge and all of a sudden we heard a loud whump and the water in the channel rose up a fraction and then subsided, leaving wet marks on all the wooden pilings.”
I stared at the sentence in disbelief. Where, I wondered, did that particular memory come from? Other details came crowding back. How my buddy, Bruce Nelson, and I had left our fishing poles on the ground and gone running toward where we thought the sound had come from; how it turned out that an excavator had ruptured a natural gas line, which caused the explosion that started Wagners’ house on fire; how, luckily, there was no one inside; how the house burned with an unbelievable intensity, scorching the siding and roof shingles of its neighbors thirty feet away in spite of the fact that the firemen had their hoses trained on the adjoining buildings much of the time.
A few days later I tried the experiment again. “I remember…playing tennis with a girl named Nancy Hocking at the campground in Upper Michigan by Fortune Lake. We were both maybe eleven or twelve and she had reddish brown hair and freckles and wore braces on her teeth. Later I found out she had leukemia and died that winter.”
This time I stared at the sentence through a swirl of unbidden tears. I hadn’t thought about Nancy for dozens of years. The remembrance of her dying at such a young age was still outrageous.
I have no explanation for what took place. I can’t explain why an excavator happened to hit a gas line and blow up Wagners’ house. I can’t explain why a sweetie like Nancy Hocking should have died before reaching teenhood. And I can’t explain why writing the words “I remember” should happen to trigger such memories.
But I do know that all these things happened.
