A catchy song lyric? Yes. Reality? Maybe also yes.
I’ve been thinking about how odd it is to remember specific times of life. As my girlfriend and I were talking the other day, she mentioned that she didn’t have many memories from when she was in elementary school, even though for the most part, she has a very strong memory.
It made me realize that I don’t necessarily have many memories from then either. Or maybe not that I don’t have that many memories, but without a context, it’s difficult to peg a time to them. More often, something that I’m doing will trigger a memory in my mind that then takes me back to that place. Once I’m back there, other memories start rushing back from the same time.
Maybe it was a ski trip. My family used to take a yearly family vacation to Colorado to go skiing, but when I think about it broadly, all of the memories mostly run together. I have a vague picture of the time. But if I specifically think about one of those memories that I have, I can start to remember other things that happened around that time.
For example, these ski trips that my family would go on would rotate dates throughout the year. My parents had a timeshare in Frisco, Colorado, and the date that we had it would jump I think two weeks each year. One year would be the end of January, the next the second week of February, the next the 4th week of February, etc. Or something like that at least.
The latest that it would be was the first week of April. When I first think about this ski trip, it’s all very blurry. It was probably 15 years ago, and most of my 8-year-old memories are gone. But I remember some specifics from this trip because it was so late in the year. Many of the trails that we normally would have gone on had a lot of mud on them and some trails were completely closed because there wasn’t enough snow. It was in some ways a depressing site. I also remember we skied at a place that I had never been before called Arapahoe-Basin. It had a higher elevation than Breckenridge, Copper, or Keystone, the main places we would go, so we didn’t have to worry as much about less snow on the trails.
There was a loft in the condo on this trip and I remember, for whatever reason, that on this trip, I almost fell out the window from the loft. It had a weird flippy window (yes, that’s its technical name) that didn’t have a screen, so you could reach out onto the very steep roof. There were always icicles hanging from the roof below, and I really wanted to grab one that was HUGE, so I could go show my mom. I reached and reached, but couldn’t get it, so I tried to climb partway out the window to reach down for the icicle…that is until I slipped and barely held on to the window ledge as I skidded down the roof. My heart was racing at about 1,000 miles an hour as I pulled myself back in and decided that the icicle wasn’t worth it.
If you had asked me “tell me a story from April of 2005”, I would have stared blankly at your face, but by bringing back a broader memory and diving into that memory, I was able to think of specifics that happened at a certain time.
The next generations may have a whole new concept of what these memories look like with the surge of social media in the last 15 years, but it’s interesting to challenge yourself sometimes on what memories you can actually recall from certain date periods.
It’s harder than you might think!