Scattered PIC…tures
While in Portland this last weekend, GTB would be driving me through some vaguely familiar neighborhood and I’d say something like, “Isn’t Lloyd Center right over there?” or “Are we close to the Convention Center?” I hadn’t been to Portland in at least four years, but growing up in Hometown, it was the closest thing we had to a city. It’s where we’d go see the Nutcracker at Christmas, buy back-to-school clothes, and pay visits to any doctor who could do things more complicated than our community clinic could. So it’s not terribly surprising that the town still feels like home in a small way.
Before GTB and I parted ways, I …ahem… borrowed some music from his extensive iTunes collection. I was so happy to have new stuff to blast on the drive home. The first thing I listened to was the White Stripes. I’d borrowed Elephant from Joe and BFE a while back and could sort of halfway sing along with the songs. I kept messing up, but wrote it off to the time that has passed since I last listened to it. Then I put on Journey. I know every word to “Don’t Stop Believing.” (Heaven is a funky moose!) And then I listened to Prince. I not only know all the words to pretty much everything on both 1999 and Purple Rain, but I remember the grunts and “Uh”s too.
This, combined with the memories of Portland that cropped up from the dark recesses of my cobwebby mind, has me reflecting on how memory works. I can barely remember how to get to the freeway from my own apartment, but I could drive you to the largest Nordstrom in Portland. I can’t seem to add new song lyrics to my head, but any song written before 1989 is firmly implanted.
Is it the pot I smoked during and right after college? Is it the many many years of many many beer-drinking nights? It can’t be that I’m running out of room in my head. There isn’t that much in there anyway. Do our brains lose the kind of plasticity that made it possible to memorize “Darling Nikki” far before we actually understood what the words meant?
Is this just part of getting old? Shit! It is, isn’t it?
December 7th, 2005 at 10:41 am
http://web.archive.org/web/20030720031254/http://www.members.aol.com/tributetoamerica/dontstopbelievin.swf
December 7th, 2005 at 12:03 pm
I remember when I first brought home my vinyl copy of Purple Rain…I listened to Darling Nikki over and over and over and over and over again and, being all of maybe 12 years old at the time, while I was pretty sure I knew what “masturbating” meant, was completely perplexed by the notion of engaging in said activity “with a magazine.” What did it mean? What kind of publication are we talking about? Why is Prince watching her? And, more importantly, why is this shit going down in a hotel lobby? Ah…the innocence and sweet naivety of youth.
December 8th, 2005 at 9:05 am
I wonder if the extra rush of pubescent hormones cause an increase in whatever pumps up memory. Everything is heightened (is that a word) when you are thirteen and fourteen. I don’t think you’ve lost anything. You’re just not a freaked out ninth grader any more. Tell GTB thanks for the Journey.
December 14th, 2005 at 12:59 pm
Our memories evolve and develop as we get older. As a child you are actually better at palying memory because your brain has not learned yet to compartmentalize things that are trivial or not important to remember. Our memories are sharpest as children because we retain, truely everything and then let it go as needed. We don’t lose our capacity to remember, our mind learns to retain what it thinks is most important for longer periods of time. also stress and distraction can affect memory. We are not losing anything, we are better able to compartmentalize it as not as important. Now I will step down from the intellectual lecturn and just say..yep we are getting older!