If You Say So

I have a really bad memory.  Anybody who knows me would back me up on this one.  Sometimes I call myself absent minded but that's only because it makes me feel like I have a good excuse to forget things.   Like there's so much going on in my head I can't cram it all in there.  I'm not selective either.  I'll forget people, events, places, appointments, facts.....  whole episodes of my life.  I wonder sometimes if other people experience memories the same way I do.

Some memories are so crystal clear.  I could close my eyes and be taken back to that moment in time.  Remembering the sights, exactly what was said, someone's tone of voice or a facial expression. Most surprising of all, these memories bring back the feelings, both good and bad.   Life changing moments like the first time I held both of my children in my arms.  Or the first time I laid eyes on my husband.  The time I sat holding my uncle's hand as he lay dying.  

Sometimes I wonder if some of my memories are only there because someone captured a picture of that moment.  I clearly remember cutting my sister's bangs when she was five and and I was nine.  No matter how hard I tried I couldn't get them even. I kept cutting them shorter and shorter until my mother finally intervened.  My shortlived career as a pre-teen hair stylist was memorialized in her school picture the next day.

I remember more details than just the haircut.  I sat her in a chair in the backyard while I chopped at her bangs with the dull kitchen scissors.  I put a towel around her shoulders to catch the hair.  I even remember it was a blue towel with flowers on it that my mother got out of a box of laundry detergent.   Is it the picture that solidifed those memories?  Every time we pull out my sister's kindergarten picture the story is retold.  How could I ever forget it?  Or was it my mother's anger that cemented this memory in my brain?  Why this memory above so many other forgotten moments?

Sometimes a memory is nothing more than a flash.  I have a picture in my head of myself up on the roof of my neighbors garage with all the neighbor kids trying to coax me to come down.  A big tree is just within my reach but the two inch gap looms like the Grand Canyon in front of me. I had to have been three based on where we were living at the time.  I don't remember getting up on the roof and I'm not sure how I got down either.  I  remember the terror I felt though. 

Most troubling of all is when I can't remember something that somebody else remembers so clearly.  A friend saying "Hey remember the time we......." and I have no flipping clue what they are talking about.  Could have been something from high school or it could have happened only a few years back.  I'm also ashamed to admit that a good 20% of my high school facebook friends are people I only think I know.  I really don't remember them.  They have the same friends I do.  The name seems familiar.  But if my life depended on it I couldn't recount one single conversation I had ever had with them. 

It sometimes seems as if I'm racing through my life leaving behind key pieces of it.    It's very unsettling.