That Memory Again

Last weekend I spent a lot of hours editing three fourteen-page papers of a friend who is getting a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Minnesota. They were written versions of answers to questions she will have to present orally at the end of this week. Heady shit. One of the papers was on memory.

I just so happen to have another friend pursuing her own PhD at another university who is also doing work on memory. The timing was interesting. Well, the timing was timing. It didn't really have a point and wasn't necessarily fated. It just was. I'm doing my own work on memory, none of which will, thankfully, see the inside of a PhD classroom.

A couple of interesting things have happened in the last month or so. First, I lost my pictures. Not all of them. Just the ones I took in my four years in New York. How, you might be asking, could such a responsible person do such an abominable thing? Well, I don't know. I backed them up a few months ago. Actually, I put them on CDs and deleted them from my computer so I could eke out some hard drive space, so that I can avoid throwing my ancient machine across the room before I get my new one in a few months. And those CDs? I have no idea where they are.

I stared at the empty slots in my CD suitcase thing, retracing steps that didn't exist. They didn't exist because I had absolutely no idea where they could have gone to. I just sat there. I didn't panic. I rarely panic. I just go into fix-it mode. (I'm working on that.) Like the time when I was at the Apple Store and the nice lady told me the contents of my hard drive were gone into some kind of oblivion, including my almost-complete master's thesis. (A lesson to thesis writers: send it to somebody to edit. Or, in my case, just send it to your mom, because she asked for it.) I just sort of looked at the nice lady. Asked how much it would cost to replace. And left.

But in this case there was nothing to fix. Pictures are pretty much irreplaceable. So in a kind of stunned cloud, I walked to the living room and sat on the couch. And called Alia. We discussed the lost pictures and the potentially false memory that they provide. This line of reasoning was purely an offshoot of my fix-it attitude. In other words, it was ok. I have my memories. And I moved on.....and started taking a lot of pictures (in preparation for the new camera I will have soon).

The other thing isn't really an event but more a progression. I'm well on the way to reaching the end of my book. Now, it may come in the spring, or it may very well come by the end of the year. What I know now is that I'm on page 71, which is the farthest I've ever gotten in any written document. The version I scrapped earlier this year ended at page 61. And my thesis was 63 pages.

So what does this have to do with memory? Such aspects in a memoir are a given. It's all memory, right? Except I've finally decided to write the bloody thing in chronological order. Some may say "duh" but I do not. I played around with different forms of recognition, of relaying the ways in which I have grown, so that it can somehow be more effective.

After struggling with these forms, I said "Enough!" Which probably came out differently at the time in various forms of expletives and gutteral utterances. Chronologically is where it's at. So keeping what I had written, I went back to the beginning, to my earliest memories, and I continued. I'm not editing my narrator. I'm just going. Even though I know three-year-olds don't talk in full sentences, I'm writing them out. I'll get my mommy experts to tech edit those aspects.

And I've been digging for memories. The night I sat down to go back to the beginning, I went in search of the piles of baby pictures I had saved on those CDs. But they were gone. It wasn't such a tragedy, because I'll be in California soon and I'll get them again. But it starts with pictures. My book. It starts with a discussion of what the pictures say versus what really went on. What the pictures represent are moments in time that surround those other moments that aren't necessarily memorable. Or at least aren't worthy of preserving forever. It was this dichotomy I sat down to capture that night, but I had to do it without the pictures. I had to consider the feelings that go in between those memories without the proof.

And it's a hard thing. It's a hard thing putting that period at the end of the sentence knowing that, someday during the editing process, it will most likely be deleted. The editing process will be the hardest, most likely best part of this whole experience. So with the memory I do have, I'm typing words and reaching unprecedented page counts every day. Maybe one day I'll fulfill this dream of mine. To be published. Go after a book contract. Write more books. I've got plenty of stories that just keep writing themselves.

I'm living the end of my book right now, which is a strange thing to do. At what point does today become memory? When a lesson is learned? Or when more and more pieces come together? I'm not sure yet. The end will be the hardest part to write, because I don't know how it will turn out. I'll pick a cut-off point. But it hasn't happened yet. It might just be the beginning of book No. 2.