Memory Loss

In this age of digital technology and ubiquitous cell phones, the lives of our family and friends are being documented continually through photos and video. I sometimes wonder what will become of all this data, stored on our computers and in the Cloud and on countless DVDs. Are we keeping all that content safe enough? What happens when we run out of space? What if the Cloud crashes and burns?

Fortunately, many brainiacs are working on these problems, with solutions like organic storage systems that are DNA-based, where you can theoretically store the entire history of mankind in something the size of a Rubik's cube. Or so I understand, with my limited understanding. :^)

Forty years ago, the technologies we take for granted lived only in the realm of Science Fiction. Forty years from now, who knows what it will look like?

My grandchildren will have their every step documented and stored. Many of those events will include me, so the last decades of my life will end up being captured as well, to a lesser extent.

But my parents' lives, especially before I was born, are mostly mysteries—kept behind a closed door in the corridor of Time, one that can't be accessed except through a handful of black and white photographs. Only one or two of these are of them as small children; the rest show adults. My dad is mainly on the farm with his family or on a ship in the Navy. My mom has nothing of her adolescence or teen years. There are photos of their wedding and then of their early married days while posted in Rhode Island. Then I begin to show up—but because of the fire that broke out in mom's moving van in 1988, there are only a few images of myself and my brothers as children or my parents moving through their married days. The rest are ash in the wind. It's so sad.

Did my grandparents have photo albums of my mother and her brothers? If so, where did they go? Did my maternal uncles take them instead of my mom? I certainly never saw any.

I used to feel annoyed that Mom didn't take better care of our memories. The photos were almost all on slides, in a silver metal case. Every now and then, we'd drag them and the old projector out and have a memory fest. They spent years on a shelf in the garages of various homes. Slides were considered so much better than photos; but in the end, we lost them. Technology wasn't quite there yet; we couldn't burn them to a DVD or CD.

My mother was never a big one for memorabilia, and tossed out the past (including my past) on a regular basis. I used to put this down to a lack of sentimentality but I wonder if there weren't other issues at play? I think my mom was escaping her past. She had conflicts with her family, bad memories of her youth, and a burning shame about her modest, blue-collar origins. She wanted desperately to reinvent herself. She even tried to bury her first ill-fated marriage and the child it produced, and kept these events hidden from us for years. (I wonder if my dad knew about them before he married her?)

When my son was a toddler, mom and I drove down to visit her mother in Arizona. It was the only time I remember Grandmom telling me stories about my mother's childhood—and they weren't flattering.

One of them went like this:

When Kay was a teenager in Eureka, she wanted a navy blue suit that she'd seen in a shop window. Grandmom went and looked at it but the cost was more than they could afford. Being a seamstress herself, she bought material and made Mom a navy suit, trying to replicate the store's suit as much as she could. Instead of gratitude and understanding, Kay was enraged by this offering. It wasn't a designer label, it wasn't the suit, and she wasn't going to wear it. According to Grandmom, Kay filched money out of their emergency cookie jar and bought that suit after all.

The narcissistic passion and steely resolve displayed by my mother in this tale was nothing new to me; I'd seen it many times over the years. What surprised me was how far back it started and what it implied for her family dynamics. Mother always told me that Grandmom was a stingy, mean, jealous harridan who adored her sons and hated her daughter. Conversely, Grandad was a kind, intelligent, strong, generous person who loved his daughter as well as his sons—but just kow-towed to whatever his wife wanted. Sort of Gary Cooper married to the Wicked Witch of the West.

When Grandmom told me this story, it was in a tone of bewilderment. She said she never understood my mother, never knew what drove her. That she came into life that way: hard-headed, temperamental, passionate, envious, competitive.

My mother always blamed Grandmom and praised Grandad—but upon probing, I learned that neither of them gave her the attention she needed. Neither attended her school play or music recital. Maybe they were too busy, holding down a variety of jobs—like sewing and hairdressing and house construction and phone line repair—to make ends meet for their family. Maybe they were too exhausted at the end of the day, after supper was cleared and night fell. Or maybe they did have something to answer for in missing their child's creative performances and causing her to feel unloved. Child-rearing was different back then in so many ways. (And BTW, my mother never came to our recitals and performances, either! What irony!)

Regardless, there still exist huge chunks of undocumented time in my mother's life that I will never know about or see. She told very few stories about her past, either. I know that she concurrently dated twins in high school. I know that she was popular. I've driven through Eureka with her, the town where she spent her adolescence, and seen the public buildings that remain. (But not her home.) I know she was an usherette in a fancy theater in San Francisco, with a uniform and a flashlight. I know she roomed with a group of girls in a big old house, and they had a nickname: the Glamour Girls. I imagine it kind of like the movie Backstage with Ginger Rogers: ambitious, highly social, full of themselves and their joys or woes. I know she went to UC Berkeley and majored in Art. I know she skipped a grade (as did I) and was young for her class.

But her timeline is a bit jumbled, because I also know she married at eighteen and moved to Wisconsin. So when did she graduate or did she? The Glamour Girls must have been afterwards, after she'd escaped marriage and motherhood, been denied the solace of her family, and fled to San Francisco. And that's where she met my dad. I wish I had photos of those days!

I also know, because she mentioned this about a million times, that she did some modeling.

That's not how she phrased it, of course. Whenever she said "I used to be a model," she implied that she was the Cindy Crawford of her day. The truth was that she modeled for a department store for a short while, along with some of her friends. Very 40's. She learned how to walk a runway, and she parlayed that experience into a secondary career later on, teaching "charm and modeling" to awkward girls and putting on local or military fashion shows. She even worked behind the scenes in a Miss America and a Miss Jacksonville pageant. I still remember my brothers and I being roped into a fashion show when I was about nine. We were on stage in our nightclothes and had to kneel by a prop bed and say our prayers as part of the tableau. I "used to be a model" too, briefly; I walked the runways that she was in charge of, using the gliding steps she taught me. (A very different technique from today's models, by the way, who stomp down on staggering platform heels like knock-kneed horses.)

Back then, I used to roll my eyes at Mom preening about her modeling career. But now, I recognize the enormous determination and smarts she possessed to achieve her reputation as a trainer of models and runner of fashion shows. Even if it was only for local causes or the Navy wives' benefit event.

How much will my child understand about my life? With such fragmentary evidence left, my childhood and adolescence are behind their own door, just like my mother's. I have journals, but if you've ever read someone's diary, you know what a load of rubbish they can be. I have stories and songs and poems. I guess, instead of photos, he will have to explore my words. Or maybe no one can ever really understand another person's life, the parts not lived together. We're just too busy taking care of the Now.