Why Memories Matter

" Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward."

-- Soren Kierkegaard

The wine bottle was tucked neatly between the Dickens Christmas Village firehouse and bookstore, having been forgotten all these years in our basement root cellar.  It had been more than forty years since I had poured the last glass of wine from its glass, potbellied mouth.  I worried that it would shatter at the slightest touch.

I reached in and extracted it, careful not to knock other items off the shelf.  I blew the dust off the bottle and see a number of rolled, yellowing papers inside.  It is stuffed with letters from Liz -- before the romance and courtesy of letter writing was replaced by hurried, efficiency-obsessed text messages, emoji's and emails.  

I leaned back against the cellar door and looked at the bottle.  Inside was a treasure trove of youthful feelings; the doubts and fears of two college-aged kids trying to manage a long distance affair.  An unlikely meeting at a bar in La Crosse had somehow continued -- beyond the walls of Dells Bar to Conklin Place in Madison, then to  Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Later, after retrieving the old letters, I laid them out and with great anticipation start reading.  It's like I stepped into a Time Machine -- we were still young, in college and just starting to plan our future.  

It was a time of innocence and longing.  

This one, written in red ink on toilet paper talks about a hard day of work and coming home to an empty apartment, wishing she could see me.  Another one talks about going out to eat with her room mate, then going to a movie called Ghostbusters.  "That was a great movie!" she writes.  Or another one talks about visits to Readstown, DeSoto, Viroqua and Stoddard to complete her community health nursing visits.  That would be while she was still a nursing student in college.

Someone with a sense of humor could see these letters making a romantic comedy.  A romantic dreamer, with a love for storytelling meets a beautiful, small town girl with a calling for compassion.  It would be called "Pages and Patients:  When Nurse Meets Author."  

Well, maybe not...

I read through others before coming to one of my favorites.  It was written after our first meeting.  I was home from college, hanging out at a bar with friends, and I saw a pair of eyes that were so intriguingly deep that it took me an entire weekend to figure out what had happened. They belonged to a brown haired girl who was finishing nursing school at Viterbo College.  I walked her home after bar time, and my life was never the same.

But in reading her letter, I discovered she had an interesting recollection.   It began --

"You probably don't remember me.  But I'm the girl you walked home on the fateful Friday night from Dell's.  Ring a bell now?"  

Rang more than a bell!   

"I guess I'm writing to apologize for my behavior that night.  I was a little out of sorts.  I'm not usually like I was that night..  I 'm usually extremely quiet until I get to know the person, which takes a while for me.  I also wanted to thank you for walking me home.  You really didn't have to do that.  It was nice though.  I wish i could say I enjoyed our talk on our way back, But I really don't remember what we talked about."

How funny is that?  The woman of my dreams, and she doesn't even remember me.  She went on to say that she would like to see me again if I was ever in La Crosse, and to look her up.  

Well, the rest -- as they say -- is history.  

In general, these letters expressed our worries, hopes and fears as we finished college, found jobs and dealt with the difficulty of maintaining a relationship separated by more than 200 miles.  As I read these letters, I am convinced it was overcoming this distance that kept us together.  It forced us to call each other late at night, usually after spending the night working, finishing homework or returning from the bars.  These letters were another way of putting our feelings for each other down on paper.   Absent each other physically -- it formed an unbreakable bond that is still present today.

I am so glad I saved these letters, and love the memories that formed the basis for our relationship and shaped our lives going forward.

Seems like someone said memories are like a hot cup of homemade chocolate.  Yup, it's an experience for the senses.  The comforting warmth you feel when taking a sip and the aroma of rich cocoa.  The velvety texture as it slides down your throat. 

Life is full of them,  some remembered better than others.  Our childhood, friends, college, parents and grandparents, weddings, birthdays and funerals.

Once upon a time, I've been accused of living in the past.  Which is not true because the person who said it was Liz when we were dating.  In my defense, I don't know how you can get to know someone without talking about your past.  Your friends, favorite things to do and places you have visited.  I feel like memories are who you are.  And paradoxically, provide hints to who you are going to be.

A problem develops when you are not happy with your life or relationship and constantly think your life was better when you were making all of those memories.

Over the holidays, I was reading a great book from Blake Crouch called Recursion.  Blake is a young author who writes about the future -- genetics, time travel and alternate realities.  They are fun and thought provoking.  His books have been made into television and movies.

In Recursion he's writing about memories.  The premise is that there is technology available that allows someone to travel into the past and relive a significant memory.  Not just remember it, but actually go back and be a part of it --carry on the conversations, walk the streets and participate in events as they unfold in real time.

What a great premise!

 But like all good intentions (to help a mother with Alzheimer's) it is sabotaged by bad people who want to changed the past to make a better future.  Unfortunately, like readers of any good time travel story know, you can't change the past without unforeseen things coming back to hurt you in the future.

Forget the dystopian undertones of Recursion if you can.  It will always be tempting to back back in time and change the future for the better.  There's going to be disappointments and failures in life that you would like to change.  A career path that didn't work out the way you thought it would.  Maybe someone's unexpected death.  Who wouldn't want to save a child who is killed in a car accident or a soldier who never returns from war?

Memories strengthen our sense of identity and bond our relationships with family and friends.  It gives us a framework to understand who we are and how we got here.  How many times do we look forward to getting together with family over the holidays because we had so much fun last time.  We remember the fun we had playing cards, building puzzles or watching a movie -- and want to do it again!

Which is why it's so devastating to see someone who suffers from a disease like Alzheimer's.  Not only don't they know who you are, but they struggle to understand who they are.  

Am I the only one who worries about some day not recognizing the face in the mirror?

Most days in our lives are uneventful, where nothing happens.   We get up in the morning, go to work and go to bed in the evening, with little to distinguish it from the next.  None of them remain rooted in our existence, beyond maybe a color, a sound or a taste.  It's when you step outside this routine that you create an impression that adds a dress to the color blue, a catchy phrase to a popular tune, or a new wine to your palate that makes it memorable and lasting. 

I'm in my seventh decade, and have had people and family that are as much a part of me as my hands and feet, and yet I remember so little of our times together.  It's one of the reasons I write and take pictures, cramming books and albums full of smiling faces, beautiful sunsets and time spent on the river.  I want to enjoy these memories and one of the best ways is to preserve them.

A single picture of our parents or our childhood bring back a flood of memories.  I can't say it better than Simon & Garfunkel who sang a song called Bookends, in which they sing - 

"I have a photograph.   Preserves a memory.   They are all I have that's left of you."

We learn a lot from our memories.  Time moves many of them into a box where they are kept until we find the right key and open it.  And the discovery of these letters in the cellar has just unlocked many of them, from a time when Liz and I were just finding our way through life, together.

If I was a character in Crouch's book, I would have no trouble going back to relive this memory:

The first time I met her was at a second rate bar on Third Street in downtown La Crosse.  She was hanging out in Dells Bar, and judging from the friendly conversation with the bartender, it wasn't her first time.  As it turned out, it was her birthday and the bartender looked like he had other intentions besides keeping her glass full.

My intentions, on the other hand, were to get her coffee-colored eyes -- and preferably the rest of her -- to wander to my side of the bar.  I thought I'd never get her attention through the crowded bar, so I sat there looking at her with a frothy Old Style in hand.

I was back in town with some friends who were more than willing to indulge in some barhopping.  The night was young, and so were we...

At almost 2:00 a.m., the bar was closing and I walked past her bar stool, leaning forward and told her I'd wait for her outside the bar.  On the juke box, Michael Jackson was singing "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" and I stepped out into the crisp summer night.  After the sweaty confines of Dell's cramped bar, the cool night was a shock to my semi-inebriated system.

I had told my friends to do their own thing.  Doug had found some girl he knew and Paul (who was my ride home) had slapped me on the back and vanished.  While waiting outside, I paced back and forth, taking an occasional look through the dirt streaked window to see her still sitting at the bar laughing and talking to the bartender.  

"What the hell am I doing?" I thought.  "I've never met this girl before.  I don't know her name and somehow I've got the nerve to tell her to meet me outside?  This is crazy!"

I stared at my feet, willing myself to wait a few more minutes before giving up and heading home.  It was bar time, and people were streaming from nearby bars like drunken vampires leaving their coffins at sunset.

Suddenly the sound of shoes coming from Dell's doorway caused me to turn around.  In the time it took for me to catch my breath, my eyes wandered up her noticeable curves, lingered on her small mouth and finally found her eyes, which were now searching left and right before settling on my face.

"Hey," she muttered as I grabbed her waist.  Small curls of light brown hair framed her face and neck.  My hands had touched a glimmer from heaven and I was determined not to let her get away.

"Let me walk you home," I said pushing her through a mass of bleary-eyed blood suckers.

          *          *          *

The path we chose to get to her apartment meandered through the excitement and buzz of various downtown crowds to the quiet, dark streets of more residential neighborhoods.

I discovered she was a Viterbo nursing student who had gone downtown to celebrate her twentieth  birthday with a few friends.  Where those friends were and why they left her alone with a bartender was a mystery I would never know, but at a minimum, I figured she needed someone to make sure she got home safely.  

And who better to do that than me -- a La Crosse lifer who was attending journalism school at UW-Madison, but home for a long summer weekend?

As we walked through sporadic pools of yellow light coming from the street lights, I found myself fascinated by this girl.  She was beautiful and friendly, but difficult to figure out.   Much would be said in  the coming years, but to this day, I don't know what it was that kept me with her the whole way home.  Perhaps it was something I saw in her soft caring eyes which told me this wasn't' what she was really like...

    *          *          *

The grass was wet with the dew of the early morning, as I rolled her over and kissed her on the lips.  I loved the smell of her hair --  vanilla mixed with the odor of cigarettes that still clung to her blouse like grapes hanging on a vine.  My hand found her face and I traced the curve of her nose.  

"Am I going to see you again?" I asked as we laid on our backs, watch stars fade from sight.  We were outside her apartment, still wrapped in the darkness of an early morning chill.  I could see the hard shapes of houses and trees distinguishable from the fading night sky.  Within the hour, a new day would begin, chasing the shadows and mysteries of this evening away.

"I don't know," she confessed with very little conviction.  She was lacking the energy to put much into her response.  "I'll have to let you know."

Later, as I walked home, I kept remembering her response to my question.  It had been a long night of pleasant, but unexpected discovery.  Someone once said that if you try too hard, you won't find the one of your dreams.  It happens when you least expect it. 

What if I had left early, or my friends and I had gone to a different bar?  Fate, or coincident -- call it what you will -- had played a role in tonight's encounter.  Relationships had come and gone before, but this one felt different.

I dug into my pocket and pulled out a slip of paper with her phone number written on it, and thought what it would be like to see those brown eyes again.

The start (of rest of our lives) was just a sunrise away.