All Alone in the Moonlight

One Duck, Couple of Geese

Memory is madness. I remember too much, and not enough. I remember the phone number from the house I lived in till age 11, and I remember the phone numbers of my best friends from elementary school, but not those of my best friends from high school. Like most Americans, I can remember with frightening clarity a songbook of ad jingles and sitcom themes, even when they aired years before my birth. I remember the names of so, so many kids—pals, nemeses, passersby, who I doubt remember mine.

When I lived in Vietnam, back in 1996, my friends and I would play a drinking game based on memory. Each person has to repeat an increasingly lengthy series of phrases: One duck, couple of geese, three brown bear, four running hare, and so on, devolving into quasi–tongue twisters. It’s the kind of drinking game that leaves me sober. And when I say “my friends and I would play” it, I really mean we played it once, maybe twice, and yet I still remember the litany just as clearly as I remember the street kids who’d cluster around us—Peanuthead, Fan Girl—and the nightly sheen of sweat on my body in my un-air-conditioned room at the Lucy Hotel.

I remember every stupid thing I’ve said or done, and the people I’ve hurt either intentionally or inadvertently, and at any moment I can feel the shame and embarrassment and self-loathing and regret of decades past rise in me with astonishing freshness and power and pain.

Three Brown Bear

I am not Funes the Memorious. I do not have hyperthymesia, or highly superior autobiographical memory. My memory is, on the whole, pretty good but not spectacular. I do not build memory palaces, and I will not enter nor win the Memoriad. I’ve never even bothered to memorize π beyond a handful of decimal places.

Still I remember things—details, people, moments—with relative ease. They enter my head and they stay there, within easy reach, ready to be summoned up at the speed of thought.

Words, especially, live in a part of my brain that’s a five-star hotel for memory—or maybe an army barracks. Words are always ready for action, any one of them at any time. This is why, three decades after I stopped learning French and Italian, I can still speak and read and understand them almost as well as I could as a young man with a pliable brain. The muscle memory has dimmed, slowing my speech a bit, but the core syntax and vocabulary remain. Around here, words get special treatment.

Four Running Hare

It’s the holes, then, that get me. Why, when so much of my life, so many of the tiniest details, remain at my disposal, should my memory fail? Why do I have such a hard time remembering certain things verbatim? When I was an undercover travel journalist, I took few notes, but I carried a notepad to jot down quotes specifically, because I knew if I didn’t record them in pen I would forget them. I read a ton of books, yet rarely do phrases or passages stick in my memory; I could underline significant parts, and still they would not stick. My memory is an Impressionist when I wish it were a Realist. My brother, Steve, meanwhile, can—or could—recite the last few pages of The Great Gatsby from memory. I suppose I could learn that, too, but memorization is not the same as remembering. I want the good stuff to stay with me because it’s good, not because I’ve wrangled it into a synaptic cage.

Worse are the true blank spots. When I was 9 or 10, I remember, I went to the local bank with my passbook to take out a few dollars to buy comic books, and the teller yelled at me for my poor handwriting; I left in tears. At least I think that’s what happened. There are no strong details in my memory. I don’t know how or why the drama escalated; in my memory, the incident is already over, in the past. I want to say that another bank employee followed me out and comforted me and got angry at the other teller, but that may not have happened. It’s possible none of it did. But there’s a memory-shaped space in my brain where it did.

In grad school, my classmates and I were walking around Baltimore’s Charles Village when our friend T. got hit by a car. It wasn’t an ambulance situation, but she was hurt and we weren’t far from Union Memorial Hospital, so we hustled her over there. That’s all I know. I know it happened. But I don’t remember it, not really. It’s awkward when I see T., because for her it was the beginning of years of back troubles and pain—a life-altering trauma—whereas for me it’s as if I were never even there. By now I’ve been through trying to remember it so many times, I feel like I’ve constructed my own memory of the event—the trees arcing over Guildford Avenue in the dark, us friends supporting T. on our shoulders—and I can no longer tell if it’s real or not.

Then there are the memories that have so thoroughly vanished from my brain that they have left no trace—no memory-shaped hole. About those I try not to think at all.

Five Fat Fickle Females Sitting on a Fence

Memory is often all we’ve got, for ourselves and for one another. I am who I am because I remember who I was and what I did. I woke up this morning remembering yesterday, which means I am the same person I was before—the malicious demon be damned. Memory means continuity.

And I remember you. I remember when we met, and maybe even how, and I remember what you were like ten, twenty, forty years ago: how you spoke, your obsessions and fears, the sweatpants you wore and the way your eyes got big when you pretended to be a vampire, the snow pig we made at the top of the little hill behind my house, the time you peed on my head near the creek, the roundness of your face above your school-uniform tie, your struggles with dengue fever, the way you talked about your own volatility, your anger, yet never showed anything other than outward calm. It’s important for us to remember the people who’ve passed in and out of our lives, however briefly. Our memory is their continuity, too, and theirs ours.

Six Silly Scotsmen Sipping Scotch on a Stump

The Brief History of the Dead is a 2003 novel that takes place in the afterlife, in a city populated by those who can be remembered by those still living. I can’t remember the precise plot, although it is slowly revealed that a pandemic is killing everyone, and the city’s population shrinks and shrinks, until only one soul remains—the last dead person remembered by the last living person. Where the dead go when they are forgotten, nobody knows, nobody remembers. I love this book, or I loved this book, or I remember loving this book.

Seven Sicilian Sailors Sailing the Seven Seas in a Sloop

All I ever wanted, as far back as I can remember, was to be remembered. It’s why I started writing, and why I keep writing. One day, 50 or 100 years from now, I’ll be gone—I’ll be nothing but a memory. And I want that memory held not just by my children and my friends but by something larger, some population that finds value in my work and whatever example I’ve set of how to exist in the world. I don’t know that I’m creating for the ages. I don’t expect my essays, articles, and, perhaps, novels to be read 1,000 years after my death—I may be a narcissist, but I’m also a realist. Still, could I eke out 150? 200? Could I remain a footnote, a reference point for future historians struggling to understand late 20th- and early 21st-century life on Earth? Maybe what I want is not so much to be remembered as not to be forgotten: I want to remain, I want my words to persist, I want to be there for any who would seek me out, even if few ever make the effort. (How many make the effort now?) That would be enough—it would have to be enough.

Eight Egregious Egotists—

How does this game end? I suddenly can’t remember how the eighth one finishes. Are the egotists eking out something? Egging someone on? Are they elated? Where did the remainder go? Why is the ninth one missing completely but the tenth one present: “ten tenacious terriers tearing through trashy Tolkien trilogies”? What becomes of the eleven benevolent elephants? Will I remember them all with a start in the middle of the night?

Is this how it starts, the decline? For so much of my life, I’ve wondered why my head is so cluttered with so much useless information, with memories that seem to serve no purpose, and now that those memories are beginning to fray I’m filled with sadness. How can I lose them? What am I without them? If I can’t remember them, where will they go? Will you remember them for me? Repeat after me: 549-1192. 256-0184. 253-7516. 🪨🪨🪨

Read Yesterday’s Attempt