I frequently wonder about how memory works. I can't count the number of times I've sat with my parents on any given evening and listened to them tell stories about their childhood. My mother, she can listen to a song on an oldies station and tell you what year it was popular, what grade she was in in school, and a lot of times, some memory associated with it.
My memory is nothing like that. There is nothing that clear from my childhood. I don't know if I've blocked it out (I didn't have a particularly painful childhood, but I was made fun of some for being overweight), or if my memory just doesn't work that way. When I hear a song from my childhood, I usually can't tell you what year it was popular or any particular memory associated with it, but I can tell you exactly how hearing that song made me feel. There are songs that I associate with crushes, with depression, with anger, with death... I can tell you not necessarily what season a song was popular, but what season the song evokes in my mind. "Tiny Dancer" is Summer. So is "Brown Eyed Girl." "What a Wonderful World" is spring... but maybe that one's obvious. "Imitation of Life" by REM is fall. A lot of eighties songs are winter. I don't know why. So is anything by Tool. And there are songs that evoke a very specific moment... so much so that I can almost see the actual memory in my mind.
Smells and tastes can do this, too. I have strong, clear flashes of memory... a lot of times, I can't tell you when they happened, but I can usually tell you who was there, the smells I associate with them, the sounds, what the sky looked like. They are overwhelmingly clear, but they're brief... they last a few seconds or minutes, but once they're over, I don't know anything else that might've happened that day, or even what year they're from. I can usually tell you what season they're from... because overwhelmingly, they're almost all from spring or summer. I think sometimes that my brain actually shuts down in winter. This is why I can never tell you what my best Christmas was, but I can tell you about my favorite birthdays (I was born in August) and why I remember winning the prize egg at the Easter Egg Hunt at my grandpa's three or four years in a row. I can remember what it looked like one year, even. (It was plastic, about the size my hand is now, light purple, had a light-brown rabbit with a fluffy white tail on top. I'm pretty sure the rabbit had an Easter basket, and there were either pastel flowers or pastel easter eggs on the front. I think eggs.) In certain memories, I can tell you what clothes I was wearing. (Distant memories, even. I remember a pair of pink plaid shorts I got at a yard sale one Easter because I was wearing pants and I was hot, and it was the only thing that was open. I was eight or nine that year. Or the oversized purple polka dot sweatshirt I kept pulled over my hips to hide a blood stain on my pants in 6th grade in PE. I'm pretty sure we were playing volleyball that day.)
My favorite memories I sometimes can't place in time. I just remember as a young child, taking Sunday afternoon naps on my parent's bed, the windows open and an oscillating fan lulling me to sleep. I don't know how old I was. The way the smell of gasoline and coffee or a certain slant of light (to borrow a phrase from Emily Dickinson) in the sky reminds me of going on vacation. The way the smell of fresh tomatoes or a pound cake with a crisp crust makes me think of my dead grandmother and sometimes makes me cry. The way honeysuckle reminds me of taking walks on the red dirt road near my house. Photo ops from my mind, though not always visual. A flash here, a flash there...
Maybe this is the way memory is for most people, and my mother, who seems to remember everything so clearly, right down to how much a can of coke cost when she was in third grade, is an anomaly. On the other hand, maybe it just seems like her memories are clearer than mine, that she remembers songs that way because when she was growing up, there weren't 300 stations playing different music, but four or five that all played top 40. Maybe she can tell you what a can of coke cost because, when she was my age, Coca-Cola was a treat, and her mother actually let her walk to the store and buy things herself.
Overall, it seems like I don't really have exceptionally clear memories about anything until I got in college. Maybe I was subconsciously really unhappy, and I didn't even realize it. Or maybe I did realize it, and I've blocked the memory of that too. But that doesn't explain what does get through- the good and the bad. I know it's not that I have a bad memory. I have the lyrics to at least a few thousand songs and the verses of at least a dozen favorite poems all stored in my brain. I remember a few thousand totally useless facts that makes me really good at trivia. Maybe, in all honesty, I've just never really tried to remember. I don't have someone wanting to know what my childhood was like, so I've never had to really think about it. Or maybe memories come later, that you slowly begin to remember things you didn't know you'd forgotten. This past fall, I think it was, I suddenly and very clearly remembered a Sunday dinner at mema's house that, until that point, I had no recollection of... I checked with my mother to make sure I hadn't somehow invented it, and she confirmed that the timing was right. There was nothing special about it, but all the details flashed into my mind with alarming clarity- again, no idea how old I was, but I know what we were eating and that it was summer, and I remember us all being there.
Maybe there'll be more like that, later. If the need arises. In case someone, somewhere down the line, wants to know my past.