Remember Just Enough

Part I - The Things We Forget

There is a little construction in Spanish I’ve remembered since seventh grade. It is a nuance in how a certain verb is conjugated.

With the verbs you learn earliest in taking Spanish, conjugation is simple and orderly. There is a basic structure and set of rules. The first sentences you learn generally follow a pattern of: [Subject] + [some verb] + [some noun] = [Full sentence].

I study Spanish. You play guitar. She bought pencils. Subject-verb-noun.

For this one particular verb though, sentence construction worked a little differently.

The verb was ‘olvidar’.

‘To forget.’

Instead of following the formula above, sentences with olvidar were conjugated based on the noun at the end…

In English, we would say “I forgot the keys.” The pronoun * I * is the subject, the actor, the thing that did the thing. In Spanish, when the verb is ‘olvidar’, the construction reduces the subject to a passive figure and promotes the noun to the actor.

Instead of “I forgot the time.” - “Yo olvido el tiempo.” – a person would say “Se me olvida el tiempo.”

“The time forgot itself to me.”

The time… it forgot itself to me. It was time that was the actor while I was just a person experiencing its acts.

That little quirk in construction is the kind of thing 7^th graders of middling aptitude for Spanish do not enjoy one little bit. It is an outlier that breaks the rules. It simply needs to be memorized. It will likely be on the test. And Mr. Cabrera with his sweater vest in all seasons will expect you to know it.

None of that acquits to a youthful appreciation of the subtlety of the construction.

However, when a person gets to be, say, 53 years old, and finds themselves employed in the arrangement of words for a living, my lord, it that little oddity is a beautiful little seashell unlike all of the others on the beach.

That little construction does what language at its very best can do: it conveys more than is said. It doesn’t just state, it evokes. It draws upon what the reader can be trusted to know so as to say more than what one has said. It is predicated on a cultural context. A nature of things. A disposition toward ourselves and others.

The construction is used for lighter forgettings. Ones of no offense or serious import. Petty latenesses, absent-mindedness, benign lapses of modest misdemeanor not felony.

“The time forgot itself to me.”

“The party…”

“Your sweater…”

It is not that the person themselves actively committed the offense of failing at remembering. The thought of the forgotten thing just slipped free from their mind like a soap bubble which simply floated away.

There is a subtle forgiveness in that. A softness. It implies a certain lightness to memory… and I think that is its magic.

Our minds are imperfect without that being fault or failure. It is simply the nature of our minds, our memories.

Things forget themselves to us sometimes. We are to be forgiven for the fact that our minds and memories are not perfect.

In criticism of ourselves and others, we could do with more of that gentleness of spirit. We could do with fewer absolutes, fewer blacks and whites.

We humans tend to be fairly terrible at buffing away the hard edges. We assign rules and apply them without room for mitigation. We extend little grace. We leave very little room for human imperfections to simply exist.

“Se me olvida”

It forgot itself to me.

And things do forget themselves to us. Some things. Certain kinds of things. Unfortunately, they are primarily the good kinds, the happy kinds, the things we would enjoy remembering and enjoy calling back to mind.

When my son was born, I started using Facebook as a de facto scrapbook. I was already on the platform. It made sense to post about whatever milestone he reached. It made sense to post pictures of first pumpkin-pickings and first Christmas. Those events were ‘recordables’… ‘shareables’. They were the kinds of things new parents seemed to post about.

After I separated when my son was 2 1/2, I started posting about smaller things.

Things he said. Funny moments. Things recorded not because they were big but because they were small. I had so much time with him. There were so many ‘forgettables’. Little things very much of a moment which would forget themselves to me. I treasured the time with him so much. Those little things were its gold. They were the ones I got to experience only from having been there for them. I wanted to remember them but knew I wouldn’t. So, I made a practice of writing them down. Posting them on Facebook. Sometimes, I set the audience to just me alone. They were posts to a future me.

I don’t post on Facebook anymore, but I still have an account and still visit. I am that future me. I go on Facebook these days for a single reason: to visit the ‘memories’ tab and re-read what I posted in years past.

It is routinely a joy. The reason is because of all the things I recorded when my son was little which have forgotten themselves to me. Yesterday’s was a moment from when he was five. He had taken to wearing a plastic wristwatch to Pre-k. It had no actual functionality, but he liked it, so on it would go in the morning. That particular day, instead of putting it on, he handed it to me and asked me to turn it back so it was earlier… so we had more time… so we could go out for breakfast. In the Facebook entry with the quote, I wrote “Oof, if only it worked that way…” If only it did. If only…

That moment… I would have never remembered it had I not written it down.

Things forget themselves to us.

Our brains, our memories, they are so very good at remembering certain things; they just aren’t the things you would most love for them to capture in high definition.

The love, the joy, the moments that make your heart swell, the times when you feel glad to be alive and lucky for that chance… those moments, our brain records as if through a gauzy haze.

The images lack completeness and sharpness - and then they fade to softer still. They are like photographs printed to a cheap paper. The hard acid of time wears away at the memory stored in fibers until what is left is more watercolor than capture.

That is just the way our memory works. It remembers our joys in low definition.

There are things that our brains record in higher definition. They aren’t our moments of greatest joy, and they impact whether we will ever experience more like them.

[Breaking here for length. Continued in Part II.]