Hold on to your memories

by Josephine Strand

(first published in Memoirabilia Magazine in 2016)

How I wish there were a recycle bin in our brain for old memories to be stored in. Then, when we’re unable to fully recall a life experience, all we’d need to do is look for the missing ‘file; and ‘restore’ it to its original place.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. At least, not yet.

I once read that long-term memories are not stored in just one part of the brain, but they are widely distributed throughout the cortex. Not in an orderly pattern, like on a computer hard disk, but scattered haphazardly. I like to think that perhaps that’s the reason it’s so hard to recover the memories we lose.

I sometimes have fleeting flashbacks related to my distant past, snatches of memories I can’t fully dredge up.  My writer’s brain fantasizes, pretending my cortex is an old, fragmented hard drive, and tries different ‘key words’. Was it saved as ‘Driving through the Karoo Desert on a hot summer day’? I mentally key in ‘desert’ then ‘Karoo’. Nothing. I search and search, but all I can dig up are fragments of memories, random data files floating in a messy recycling bin.  

If not for some old, faded photographs to prove it really happened, there’s little left of that family road trip in my aging brain. Flashes of an old blue and white Fiat 1100, the roof rack stacked with our luggage, towels hanging from the car windows to block out the scorching sun. The rest—the stifling heat, the vast open landscapes that merge into the iridescent horizon, the home-packed sandwiches eaten on the side of the road on top of abandoned drum barrels—are little more than a blur. And no matter how much I rummage through that rubble of discarded memories, I can’t bring up much else about that trip—a remarkable one, for sure, to have left a lingering feeling of nostalgia in me.

How did those precious memories manage to get lost in the first place? Didn’t such story not seem important enough to be shared in later years with family and the future generations of children? Like the newspaper clippings I saved of the first moon landing—a cool story to tell my grandchildren one day. Or so I thought. Ridiculous, when you think about it, when all that’s required these days is to key in a few words in a search engine to find out just about anything about everything imaginable. And let’s face it, at a time when astronauts have reached interstellar space and space tourism is a fast-approaching reality, a lunar expedition that took place half a century ago is not likely to evoke an intense interest in anyone younger than Generation ‘X’.

But close and personal, real-life adventures, like my family’s crazy road trip through the Karoo Desert in the 1970s, on the other hand, is something a child would find fascinating even in this day and age. I imagine myself holding my future grandchildren spellbound with anecdotes of wild critters slithering on the desert floor, of an endless ribbon of road snaking through craggy mountain passes and red sandy plains, its deep silence broken only by the rumble of the car engine and our loud, off-key singing. No doubt, they would listen enraptured as I relate the precious time lost trailing behind a heard of sheep as it inched slowly across the road to the other side, and the emergency overnight stop for a leaking water tank in a tiny, isolated desert dorp, where the only ‘accommodations’ was a sleeping bag on someone’s airy stoop under the starriest sky anyone has ever seen. With a little bit of imagination and the help of the old photos, it’s easy to fill in the blanks. But then it wouldn’t be authentic. There’s so much more to the real story, so much that was negligently lost, all ending up in that bottomless memory bin of an outdated cerebral hard drive no skilled technician or hacker can ever revive.