Notes Toward Memory and Non-Memory, the Imposition Of

1

She has a day planner. Each night she writes in it the events of the day. Everything always after it happens. Sometimes she tries to write things in advance. These things she rarely does and must cross out. Write in new.
She does this for self preservation. So as to not forget. Misplace. Lose entire days.

Every Saturday evening, she writes in “farmers market.”

Today is Saturday morning. She is at the market. Stands face one another, create a lane. Many people bring their dogs through with them. The girl doesn’t have a dog, only her basket and vegetables.

Perhaps the dogs or some scent from one of the stands triggers the memory. Or a feeling.

2

The dog had been lying on his stomach when the little girl walked over. Short legs bend and she’s down, on her stomach. Sneakers and arms inch forward until her tiny nose against his nose. Touching, but soft, probably. They lay that way for a long time.

It happened in the country market, in front of produce bins. The girl remembers the cracks in the cement floor where the squares met. Dirt and pebbles.

3

The first time the girl recalled the memory with the dog on the floor was after her mom recounted it to her at the same market years later. The girl thinks she remembers that the market clerk asked her mother if this young woman was the same little girl who had lain on the floor with the dog and hadn’t that been so sweet?

Why is this memory so important to remember, other than it’s preciousness? Because of what it may mean. Another memory, but one of the girl’s mother. This dog had not always been in the market. This dog had belonged to the mother for a long time before the girl was born. In fact, the mother gave the dog to the market just before.

While pregnant, the mother had lain on the bed. The dog, Fred, lie on the bed with her. The girl in her belly, the dog on her lap. His head, nose to her navel. And that is how they would lay together for long stretches. As though Fred knew the little girl was in there. Or, in fact, he did.

Did the girl and the dog know one another in this moment? Did each somehow “remember”?

Is this the opposite of knowing a face and being unable to place it?

4

This memory, the girl realizes, may or may not be a memory, which is not so much a memory as it is a recreation. Phantom memory. Because she didn’t remember until her mother told her. If not a memory that is, a memory that should be. She hopes that it is.

She read that if a person remembers a memory and can see him or herself in the memory as though a camera shot from an outside angle, that it is not a memory at all. It is a memory of the retelling.

When she fears that it is a phantom memory and not a real memory, she tries hard to validate it. Force it into real. Retrieve. To the point she believes. Yes. And she remembers it. After the image, the feeling of it. Through the eyes of the young girl.

This must be a real memory because she cannot see herself but sees out of what would be or were her eyes. She looks into brown eyes at the end of a snout, blurry from proximity. Cold of floor through her tee and shorts. Dirt and dust. The door across from her and wooden legs of stands. Cold nose slowly warming. This moment.

She imposes memory upon herself.

The girl has this in her head and she tries to tell herself, this is it. The memory. But she still is not and cannot be sure. Her mind is clever enough to outsmart her.

(Why is it so important to remember? Does she remember the floor as being cool because it was or because it often is and has been? Should be.)

And when she’s uncertain she thinks of this: it must be a memory the way that the time Fred escaped from the house and ran downtown is a memory. When her grandfather saw the dog near the town square, slowed his car, and yelled out the window, “Fred, you better get home or you’re gonna get beat!” and Fred ran home.

A memory of the retelling. She imagines it perfectly as though she’d been there, hears the timbre of grandfather’s voice and the volume. Can see the dog’s legs, two at a time hit pavement. The tail. White gazebo on the square. The imposed setting, which she knows and has seen for years.

The superimposed image, the dog and her grandfather.

5

She thinks about the touching noses. She read that olfactory is the strongest sense and most powerful memory trigger. The olfactory impulse to the brain connects to the limbic system which is where the brain deals with emotions.

If it were a memory, couldn’t she remember what the little girl on the floor with the dog was thinking? Did she know who the dog was? What emotion did he evoke? Did she recall the memory or the emotion? Or does the emotion recall the memory?

She wonders if that little girl, too, was trying to remember but of the womb.