Taking my own advice, I recently went through some old photos with the intention of organizing them into a photobook.
Doing this led me to discover a strange gap in my memory: the last 18 months or so are very clear. Everything pre-2012 is pretty clear, too. But there’s a stretch of years – approximately 2013 through 2017 – for which my memories are fuzzy at best. I was genuinely surprised by some of the photos I found from that time period. Things, places, events that I was sure I never would have remembered if not for those pictures.
Sure, I could blame it on the mental haze created by parenthood, but I started to worry. Might there be other things, things I don’t have photos of, that I’ve simply forgotten forever? Has my brain hit its capacity for new memories, and deferred that responsibility to my phone?
Slowing myself down a bit, I found a comfortable couch and did something I almost never do: nothing.
Well, not quite nothing. But I had a lie down, closed my eyes, and just wandered through my memories of the last decade. At first it was mostly a replay of the pictures I’d just been looking at. But slowly, mercifully, other images started coming back.
I started purposely going through memories of things I hadn’t taken photos of. The building I worked in before we moved offices. People I had known a few years ago, but not well enough to have photos of. I remembered what those places looked like. I remembered what those people sounded like.
Not only was it reassuring to know that my brain still worked, but it was also oddly relaxing. It was like falling asleep while watching a movie. These memories were the deleted scenes of my life: mundane places, casual acquaintances, uninteresting events…all things that hadn’t earned a photo, but were constants in my life at one point.
Try it sometime. I’m not qualified to give advice on brain health, but it seems like a good way to dust off the mental filing cabinets every once in a while.
The elusive nature of memories was front and centre in Ingrid St. Pierre’s life when she wrote “Ficelles.” Her grandmother was in the latter stages of Alzheimer’s, and this song was St. Pierre’s reaction to watching her grandmother’s memory slowly disappear.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The lyrics. St. Pierre begins with a list of things that, we assume, are things her grandmother remembers. “The days and the seasons / the colour of my eyes / the words to songs we used to sing together.” But with the inclusion of the line, “but don’t forget my name,” the listener gets the impression that perhaps that list was of all the things the grandmother has already forgotten.
2. The imagery. St. Pierre sings that if the memories get blown away on the wind, she will make a kite for them.
3. Despite the subject matter, the pentatonic melody gives the song a simple beauty that echoes French-Canadian folk music. I’m not sure it’s intentional, but if it is, it’s great that a song about memory has a strong link to St. Pierre’s cultural past.
Recommended listening activity:
Writing your name somewhere secret in your house, and wondering if someone might find it someday.
Ingrid St. Pierre was recommended by a reader. Thanks, Bill!