The Off Season: Celebrating the power of memory

By Mike Lunsford

We sat in the pews of our small country church sanctuary a few Sundays ago, and before long our class was deep into a discussion about memories and how the prophet Isaiah reminded us that we were to “forget the former things,” that we are “not to dwell on the past.”

Our problem wasn’t that we wanted to argue about the validity of Scripture; we just didn’t have a whole lot of agreement as to what Isaiah actually meant when he relayed his boss’s message to us. After all, a few chapters later, the Lord tells his people to “Remember this,” and to “fix it in mind.”

Our Sunday school teacher, Tim, who happens to be my wife’s cousin (just about everyone at the church is related in some way or another) used my storytelling as part of his object lesson for the morning. Without suggesting that I simply make things up as I write, he said that there’s no way that I can probably remember absolutely every detail I use.

I didn’t argue, but I believe that the vast majority of my trips to the past are pretty accurate. I can still place kids in the rows where they sat in Mrs. Milner’s fourth-grade classroom, and I can still recall the patch of woods that stood behind our home place like the back of my hand. I can remember the first pair of basketball shoes I ever owned, too…

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with allowing our minds to wander back in time every so often. I sure hope there isn’t, since I seem to be spending more and more of my free time in the cobwebbed rooms of my memory these days, for it’s not only Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey who’s had a wonderful life.

Yet, there are black holes, bits and pieces of the past that I’ve allowed to slip away. Until I gabbed with my sister this past Christmas, I had forgotten how, years ago, we — my cousin, Renee, was often a willing accomplice — used to crawl through an eerie, crawdad-filled drainage pipe under the county line road. It was a good thing to get reacquainted with those hot summer days of the past, even as there was snow on the ground and we wore sweaters in the warmth of my brother’s living room some 45 years later.

I’ll admit that every once in a while, I may smooth over the occasional rough edge of a story with the concrete of truthful intentions, with fragments of past history as I think they happened. But even though I may not remember where I’ve left my car keys, and I often swear my son has moved my tools when he hasn’t, I seem to be able to remember things from my childhood, from days when it seemed that all I had to worry about was whether my mom had restocked our cereal supply, or if I could scrounge up enough old lumber to finish my tree house, or whether I’d get much traffic at the road-side vegetable stand that I shared with my grandpa during sweet corn and tomato season.

John Irving, who knows a whole lot more about the craft of writing than I ever hope to, says that our memory is “a monster; you forget — it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you — and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory,” Irving once said, “but it has you.”

He may be right, but I’ll take my memories, even the tough ones, even the painful and mean ones that seem to creep up on me from behind, because the good ones seem to far outnumber the bad anyway.

I am who I am because of the accumulated effect my past has had on me. I learned that an iron is hot after dragging one across my belly as a youngster trying to help my mother with chores, but it hurt only a fragment as much as watching her years later as she struggled to write with her right hand after a stroke had taken the use of her left one away, her beautiful, graceful penmanship with it.

No, our memory is more friend than foe. It may be an illogical thing, but it is a powerful force in our lives of the moment. Its fickleness astounds me because when I try to remember something — the name of a song, a television actor’s face, where I left the extra shoestrings — it fails me. Yet, just last week, the batting statistics for Carl Yazstremski’s Triple Crown season — 1967 — popped into my head as if programmed there like some Manchurian candidate’s clandestine instructions. It makes no sense…

A few weeks ago, a fourth-grader in whose class I sat to talk about writing, asked me what my “favorite memory” was. Without hesitating, I told him and his friends that I can still clearly see a night when I was 9 or 10, and the headlights of my dad’s pick-up truck bounced off the trees as he pulled behind our house after a day at work. He often handed me something as he walked through our back door — a nail or a nickel or a stone he’d picked up from some construction site — so I was always there to jump into those big freckled arms of his.

As I ran to him, he pulled a brand new baseball glove out from behind his back. Even then I was a sucker for the Red Sox, and even though it was a Gary Peters model, and he then played for the White Sox, it was the first glove I could call my own. Simply put, I thought my dad was the greatest man alive; to this day, I can still feel my hand sliding into that glove for the first time; I can smell its smell, and I can see the rusty brown of its long fingers and deep pocket.

Sometimes, late at night, when sleep has decided to take a walk and I lay in the darkness thinking about this and that and the other, I move the packing boxes of past years around in my head. Most of what I recall is good; some isn’t.

It’s true; my memory may own me. So be it.

Mike Lunsford can be reached at hickory913@aol.com, or by regular mail, c/o the Tribune-Star at P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. Learn more about his book, “The Off Season: The Newspaper Stories of Mike Lunsford,” by going to his Web site at www.mikelunsford.com. He will be speaking Tuesday at the Paris Public Library. Read more about it at www.parispubliclibrary.org.