memories

I read an article about a woman in Seattle having no "episodic memory"--she can't remember a thing about her childhood, high school, wedding, a vacation cruise she went with her husband a year ago, or just where she shopped the day before, yet she still conducts a normal happy life as a bright, sensible and passionate person, evident of, say researchers, her memory of another kind, called "semantic memory", one that retains essential knowledge for her intellect and cognitive skills such as memorization of multiplication table and spelling and understanding of words, is still intact and functioning as well as yours and mine.

I figure that episodic memory deficiency is a sliding scale, not an absolute 0-or-1 thing, otherwise I can't imagine how she can conduct a happy normal life if she can't remember where she parks her car every time she goes out.

Modern scientific findings aside, I think people treasure their episodic memories quite much. I remember an old survey asking what items people will rescue first when a fire breaks out at home, besides human lives, the number one answer came back to be "family albums"; and in some post-disaster interviews I saw people with lornful eyes overlooking their former home site now in ruin, murmuring "there's nothing left to remember now..."

Social networks the likes of Facebook and Instagram probably have turned that scene a little sideways. People nowadays can photo-document minutiae details of their lives and keep them in safe cloud haven forever until the day fire burns down the last data centers on earth. To the extent such omnipresent tools keep us many little brothers (vs one big brother) constantly watching over each other, there comes some other social media tool to the rescue, that will trash the spur-of-the-moment photos moments after they are taken, for people who want not every instant of their human behavior be held accountable for the rest of their lives.

But memories are always more than just some photographic images or mementos or even facts of the day when things happened. It includes morphing our emotions and particular take of the events, consciously and subconsciously, into what really happened, thereby many versions of memories arise:

The selective kind are the ones where we register only things we like to remember, thus the nostalgia, the good-old-days, the "what's too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget, so it's the laughters, that we will remember..." as Barbra Streisand sings beautifully in the song "The Way We Were".

And the fabricated or compromised kind, where we self-induce or are induced to create mishmash of things of non-happenings. President Reagan had been accused of mixing fictions with facts in some of his episodic story telling; some child molestation cases were dropped when it turned out children or supposed victims were coached into "reciting" incidents that had never occurred but were planted by the counselors/prosecutors in their minds.

The thing called "common memory" is what makes reunions such happy occasions, when it not only brings instant reconnect with acquaintances of old but also the shared experiences with them remind and affirm who we are and where we come from in positive light.

Losing memories, or being forgetful, is generally looked down upon as a bad thing, a sign of senility or worse the onset of dementia diseases such as Alzheimer's to come. But forgetfulness is a bliss when hurtful things can self-exit our memory lanes without any effort of our own, and it takes great wisdom and true grit to "forgive and forget" people and things that are wrongfully done onto us.

America is celebrating its 240th birthday today. I have no personal episodic memories with this adopted nation of mine--no friends or relatives I know of came on May Flower or fought in the Civil War, for sure. But I do have some semantic memories of it--knowledge and affection I gain through 34 years of living in this land of the free and the home of the brave--to tell.

I know it's generous, it's kind, and it takes people of all kinds (including the like of Donald Trump). I love its can-do spirit, get-hands-dirty attitude, Yankee ingenuity, and hell-raising honesty with itself. Its simple people, its natural beauty, its check-and-balance, never-say-die, ever-so-pragmatic systems and culture. Its warts and all.

Happy 4th of July!