The studious Bodzins and the working-class Taitelbaums did not approve of whatever it was that their children were doing together (presumably, except for singing), and the couple did not announce their marriage for months. I never found out why they let the families in on the secret when they did, or how. In fact, we never even knew exactly when they got married either, because they gave a fake date to their parents. But the sparks set off by that experience lingered for years. The two families did not share more than a handful of celebrations in all the years we lived near them in Detroit.
This was the second occasion I had recently to relive some events of the distant past. My youngest (now my only) brother, Henry, came to Kelowna for a few days, and we occasionally touched on matters that, if nothing else, showed how two people growing up together could be left with two very different sets of memories.
I have been aware of this for a long time. Memories are less a matter of what happened than of what remains in the mind. And as we all have different experiences, the things that impress us about any given event will also be different.
In response to one of my occasional writings about the uniqueness and idiosyncracy of individual memory, Henry would occasionally ask me if I remembered something from our youth and I would often say no. I was never ashamed not to have retained everything that happened to me when I was young — very few people do, and I do not envy them. Besides, I could always mention something I remembered that Henry had long ago forgotten.
On this visit, Henry mentioned that when we were young — the word means something different to each of us because i am almost nine years older than he is — our mother reduced her washing load by limiting the number of towels we could use. So we dried ourselves with a washcloth instead and used a towel only to finish the job. When he said he still does that, Catherine perked up because I do the same thing. We have shared that quirky habit for years without knowing it, and, in my case, even without remembering why the practice had started in the first place.
Some life stories are interesting to people who did not live them but many are not, and how Henry and I have dealt with washcloths for more than fifty years will strike most readers as a trivial illustration of nothing. But it clearly shows how inconsequential are many of our memories.
I have often thought about another example. I was named after my father’s mother’s father. Except for his name I know nothing about the man — where he lived, what he did, how he provided for his family — yet this information was essential for his family a century ago.
We all want to leave something of value behind us when we go, but most people leave nothing but a name. The money, the reputation, the direct consequences of a life, are all swallowed up in time, sometimes fairly quickly.
I’ve been writing this piece on and off for almost a week now, and I’ll conclude with two quotations from literature. The first is Shelley’s poem Ozymandias:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Finally, as Kurt Vonnegut reminds us, so it goes.
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