September 6, 2013
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Memory Tricks
In the dream, I was notified that someone had been making withdrawals, depleting my savings account. I recalled (in the dream) that I had a joint savings account with my first husband. I hadn’t told him about it (in the dream) because I knew he would take the money and blow it on small extravagances, and I wanted to save for something big and unspecified in the dream. There had been a lot of money in that account, or what to me at the time (the dream time) seemed like a lot, and now (in the dream) he had somehow found out about it and it was all gone but for a token few dollars and cents.
I woke. I lay there thinking, first about the man, the first one I married — 1958, that was, and I’ve not seen nor heard from him since the ‘sixties. I did get a nasty letter in the late 1970′s, from his then-current wife, warning me to leave him alone and stay out of their lives, after I had phoned his mother, just to let her know that she had become a great-grandmother. The evidently terrified woman who wrote to me had nothing to fear from me, except maybe from the memories of me still held in her then-husband’s mind.
My mind trailed on from that into thinking about dreams and memories in general. It’s absurd to think that someone would be a co-owner of an ordinary savings account without having signed for it, for one thing. That I might ever have saved a lot of money without having withdrawn it to squander on things like food, rent or bail money is another absurdity in that dream.
Then, for some reason, I was reminded of something that happened a few days ago, online. I was logging on to pay a credit card bill and was prompted to give them, for security, my first pet’s name. Momentarily stumped, the old memory finally kicked in. In fact, more memories kicked in than had done so at the time I set the answer to that security question. I recalled not only the name of the turtle, my first pet, and the name of the duck that came after him, but also that the answer I had set was actually that of my third pet, which had been, at the time I set it, the first pet I could recall.
When I started blogging my memoirs a decade or so ago, one frequently repeated comment was on the quality of my memory. People seem amazed at the depth and detail of what I recall, while I’m more aware of how much I have forgotten. Memories come and go on their own, with little regard for what I want to recall.
Remembering and forgetting are much on my mind recently. Dementia of one sort or another is making life sometimes difficult. I had been thinking it was Alzheimer’s, but from what I’ve been reading it seems more like fronto-temporal degeneration. Maybe if that guy hadn’t spent my old (imaginary) savings account, I could squander some of it myself on an expert medical opinion on that, but why bother? If I live long enough for a cure to be found, or even if I learn of a promising clinical trial I might get in on, I’ll check into that. For now, I’ll just keep remembering, or not.
*Apparently, the time signature here is set for UT, so, until I get around to fiddling with my settings, just subtract 8 hours or so.
