Musing over Memories

Have you ever had anyone ask you: "What were you doing on (such and such a date)?" Well, many of you probably weren't even alive on this date, but I remember exactly what I was doing on the afternoon of July 21, 1969. But mostly, I remember the place: the lifeguard chair of the Charleston Naval Air Station's Officer's Club Pool. Of what import you ask? Let me expand...

Just finished an article in this week's Newsweek regarding memory: "Mysteries of Memory" wherein Jeneen Interlandi speaks of the idea that "the physical space in which events occur may, in fact be that scaffolding..." upon which human memories are created.

As a child, we moved frequently. My mother joked that in 26 years of marriage, she had moved 17 times. That's a bit of moving. But it's also a bit of locale changes, which makes for somewhat easier retrieval of memory as they are associated, say, with the time we lived in Virginia Beach (where we experienced Hurricane Donna, for example, and lived across the street from Alan Shepherd, but also lived in a time when no one locked their house doors, or even had house keys!) or Quonset Point, Rhode Island (where we ice skated on frozen Naval base pools, swam illegally late at night in those same pools, glimpsed John Kennedy in the flesh as-close-as-from-me-to-you) or Charleston, South Carolina (where we found the bar scene quite lively with the likes of our cousins' oh-so-successful group "The Wayfarers" and heard Neil Armstrong's words as he walked on the moon from the loudspeakers on the naval base).

I've always had a strange connection to place, anyway, and now maybe, I have a scientific explanation for why. Put me next to the ocean, and I feel almost primordial; leave me for a while underneath the peaks of Yosemite Valley, and I am rejuvenated. Take me 40 years back, as I did last fall with my high school reunion, and I want to re-visit all those spots, those places that actually look the same to me as they did way back when. (Despite some minor changes, of course.)

In the same Newsweek article, Harvard psychiatrist Salzman discusses Alzheimer's patients and ends one question with the strangest of advice: "...singing songs from the person's childhood may help you maintain contact with them, (late-stage victims of the disease) at least for a few moments." Do the songs take the person back to a place, that scaffold of memory, where those memories were laid down/embedded in the first place? I like to think so; bravo for Salzman for sharing that with us and to Interlandi for sharing the research that suggests that place might be as important in brain function as it is, at least, for me, in memory.

So much for my thoughts on memory on this beautiful September afternoon, when moving back into our old (yet renovated) offices at work/school was such a drudge, and a place I definitely was relieved to leave at day's end.