A few years back (I was probably 42) I asked my aunt Pam a question.
I had a memory of going out with her and my uncle on a lake in North Carolina on a pontoon boat. Someone was lighting fireworks on the shore.
“Did we do something like that 10 years ago?” I asked. “It’s been bugging me for months. I think it’s a memory, but it feels like a dream.”
The memory was scarcely more than a vapor. Nothing bracketed it or anchored it to reality, but there was one other detail: in the same memory, a lively older woman sat on a porch, her back against a blind rolled down to keep the sun off her shoulders.
Something strange has happened to time in my 40s. Are my memories fading? Or have I stopped recording memories in acute detail?
There are other wispy memories I've recalled recently, many involving old friends.
Oliver invited me to a beef and beer at an old VFW. It was a rugby fundraiser. I don’t know when. There was a PowerPoint with pictures of his rugby team, but I don’t recall the food.
Victor Roehm visited me in Philadelphia before either of us had gray hair. We ate at… Penang? I think? It had been a long time since I saw him. Now it’s been even longer. That memory floats in a cloud, like meeting Lauren Ross Busterna around that time at my favorite coffeehouse. Lindsey Godwin once visited me. She had a baby with her in a seat. Or was that my cousin Andrew with the baby? Or both? Was that at my current house? Or my old house in South Philly?
Or did it happen at all?
What I find disquieting is that until about 2010, I could place my life on a timeline. I could remember things that happened and when. With another 13 years behind me, though, it’s become mush.
I’m not a cognitive scientist, but I’ll take a guess at what’s happening. I would guess a young brain is primed to take in and record new information and new experiences all the time (and, when you’re young, every experience is new).
I’d also guess that “old experiences” don’t write to memory very fast—even memorable ones. By age 46, meeting a friend I haven’t seen for a decade for coffee, as wonderful as it is, is not a novel experience.
When I was 38, I went to India. The country threw me completely off-guard. I remember much of it vividly - perhaps because it was all new. Most of life for a decade until then had not been. Likewise, I recall my first trip to Bangkok much better than subsequent trips. Neither experience was as vivid, however, as my trip to Europe when I was in high school.
And so, on my 46th birthday, I’m now like Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional optometrist who became “unstuck in time,” zapping from one period of life to the next and trying to make sense of where I am, when it happened, and what it means.
It's not bad. It’s forced me to live in the moment a little more like my dog Winston, who enjoys his bone with no memory of the past or worry for the future.
And yes, Aunt Pam confirmed we did go out on a pontoon boat on July 4, many years ago. The woman in front of the sunshade, however, may have been a dream.