Memory

NEW YORK, NY – Jan. 17, 2010 – I walked past a swanky hotel last night and was hit by a wave of memory. The hotel is called something else now but I knew it in the 70s as the Southgate, across the street from Madison Square Garden on Seventh Avenue. Back then, I was a volunteer with a new-age group called est and we held many seminars at the Southgate. I knew all its back hallways.

Last night, I instantly recalled a beautiful woman I met there (she still is beautiful), personal interchanges, the aromas and sounds of the hotel ballroom, even snippets of conversations, one of them with a well-known actress.

Ever wonder what happens when our memory drive gets full? The one in our brains. On my laptop computer, it tells me that I’ve got to delete something in order to save new data. Since that’s not an option with our brains, then what?

Just think of the details you can recall. I remember my first kiss. (Quite well!) And before that my first day on the air at a radio station. Working backward: playing a bassoon, attending a funeral, getting baptized, getting tickled by my grandfather Papa Lewis, saying goodbye to my father as he left for the War when I was three years old.

If you added them all together, there would be thousands. Perhaps millions. So how much memory space do we have anyway?

And what about the other kinds of memories? The unresolved resentments, simmering anger from slights (real or imagined) from years back. Ex-spouses, teachers, school bullies. If you lived long enough and amassed enough memories, wouldn’t you run out of room? Maybe that’s why children can learn a foreign language easier than adults.

Is that perhaps a factor in Alzheimer’s? The memory chip is full?

Since it’s not practical to “forget” memories like first kisses and grandfatherly tickles, maybe our only option is to let go of the resentments and simmering anger. That would certainly create more memory space. I try to clean out those “files” on a regular basis but I see people on the subway who’re carting around a whole head-full of spiritual and emotional goop. You can see it on their faces. They’re barely able to see for all the distracting images from the past that cloud their vision.

Their glasses are not rose-colored. Theirs are brown and stinky!

I’m not aware of any studies linking Alzheimer’s with unforgiveness. But it would be interesting to see if anyone has done any correlation between the two.

And maybe there is none. But just to be on the safe side, as they around here, "It couldn't hoit!"

Copyright 2010 James C. Lewis