Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
Memory experts tell us what we already know. As we age, we remember certain aspects of an event, but the details begin to fade almost immediately, and then we begin to apply our own reality, and eventually the space between what we believe happened and what actually occurred becomes ever wider. This is the process of “gistification,” a word which was created by those same experts, but one you will not find in Webster’s.
But what happens when we forget an event completely? My original guess assumed that this would be called amnesia, but again the experts reveal it’s not that simple. The Baycrest Foundation, a nonprofit tasked with raising funds for Alzheimer’s research, offered this little tidbit in a recent article about memory loss:
Forgetting is part of a healthy brain’s rhythm. It filters what’s irrelevant, reinforces what’s useful, and clears space for growth. The concern arises only when lapses become persistent, disorienting, or interfere with life.
Well, thank goodness for that.
Recently, I’ve started to worry about my own memory…and when I say recently, that is also a fuzzy term.
My wife and I visit a lot about our vacations in the past, and most often when we do, I’ll say to her: “Well, that was about five years, right?” Which prompts her to check her journals or the photographs on her phone.
This is the type of response I usually receive: “No…that trip happened over ten years ago.” It’s somewhat disappointing that the actual elapsed time seems to be about double of what I think it should be.
Silently, I’m thinking how did that happen? What happened to all those years when I wasn’t paying attention?
However, I became most concerned when visiting with people I’ve known since dirt was young. The other day…or maybe it was a few years ago… whatever, I met one of my fellow LVHS Class of 1976 classmates on the street, and of course when that happens the reminiscing begins.
He then proceeded to ask, “Remember when…” and when he finished with one of our many shared experiences from decades ago, I had to admit to him that no, I didn’t remember that exact episode in my life. He looked crestfallen, as if I had somehow committed an act of classmate treason, and to be honest, I couldn’t blame him.
How could I have forgotten such a potentially disastrous occurrence in my life? I was so disturbed by my forgetfulness that I contacted another alleged participant in the event, and he was also incredulous that I could not remember the events of that winter evening in the dusk of my unmarried life.
Slowly, however, I began to recollect the events of that night…with the help of both cohorts, and I was finally able to piece together what actually happened. The blame for this near calamity can be placed squarely on my car, not any of the decisions I made that night…of course.
In the late 1970s, I owned a 1970 Mercury Cougar. Under the hood, one could find a Cleveland 351 cubic inch engine with a four-barrel carburetor, a combination that needed premium fuel to operate optimally. Naturally, with an engine of that size in a relatively small car, most of the weight was distributed over the front wheels, with little weight on the rear wheels, which of course were the wheels that drove the car.
That situation was fine on dry roads and streets and the sometimes slick winter streets of town, but on the highway, icy roads were a hazard I tried to avoid, if I could, because the unbalanced weight distribution would cause the car to spin out of control, even at what I viewed as reasonable speeds. The trick of placing sandbags in the trunk to put more weight on the driving wheels of the car didn’t occur to me until later, after this episode had run its course. For most young men in their early twenties, it seems, hindsight provides so much more clarity.
At the time I owned the car, I had somehow been persuaded, with minimal experience, to join a Friday night bowling league with two of my coworkers and a former coworker, the sponsor of which was Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. Over the course of many Friday evenings, enough of the golden liquid was consumed such that good judgement would sometimes be somewhat compromised.
It’s not something of which I’m particularly proud, but it is what it is.
The short story of this forgotten event is that after the bowling competition ended one evening, four of us decided to drive down to Laramie to wake up some of our high school classmates, who were then college students, and demand that they get out of bed and have a good time with us. Also, my brother Bob was finishing up his last semester in electrical engineering then, and I was sure he would appreciate an early morning surprise from his little brother.
We started out from the Lander bowling alley in two vehicles around 10:00 at night: two Pabst teammates in one four-wheel drive truck and myself and a competitor (my classmate) in my Cougar. It was about then that this little niggling feeling wormed its way into my brain telling me that perhaps this was not a great idea. The night, as my Aunt Jeanette (a rancher from Encampment) would say, was a black as the inside of a cow.
As we progressed past the Rawlins junction toward Jeffery City, the road conditions became increasingly worse. Its surface had turned into more packed ice than dry pavement. Somehow I made it over Beaver Rim, at which time the road turned into a continuous ribbon of packed ice. At Jeffrey City, I flashed my lights at the pickup leading our little procession. Its driver pulled over and I pulled up next to it and informed both occupants that I was turning around and heading back to Lander as the road conditions were just too dangerous.
The diehard occupants of the pickup continued on to Laramie, while my passenger, who I think was relieved as I was with our decision, and I turned around and began the journey back toward town.
About twenty minutes into our return trip, the car hit a particularly slick spot on the highway and began spinning 360’s in the middle of the road, but somehow it remained on the road’s surface. I don’t know how many times we spun around as I was probably too terrified to count.
When the car finally stopped spinning, my passenger and I just looked at each other in disbelief. Finally, I said, “Maybe I better slow down.”
As we continued on our way, I think both of us were initially judging this to be the worst idea in the history of ideas. Twenty minutes later, we topped a little ridge and saw the lights of Jeffrey City in front of us, and at that point, we were sure.
We safely arrived back in Lander in the wee hours of the morning, and I am sure, even now, after having completely forgotten about this life-threatening event, that after getting a few hours of sleep and waking up that I was never more grateful to be alive.
But the larger question for me now is: What happened to my recollection of this near tragedy of over four decades ago?
I have a theory and only a theory, and that is that my 67 years can be separated into two lives.
The first life consisted of the first twenty-six years of my existence when I was single and includes a running list of all the stupid stuff that a young man does because there is no voice of reason to provide other options because most of a single young man’s companions are also like-minded, single knuckleheads.
The second life is still being lived, and that life began in late December of 1984 when my wife and I were married. For psychological hypotheses I don’t care to investigate, my theory takes the position that once a young man marries, his brain changes into one that can correctly assess the risks of a certain behavior much more rationally and then the man can select a much better decision. At the same time, the brain chooses not to remember all the dangerous, nincompoop decisions from which a young, single man inexplicably emerges unscathed.
A rider attached to this theory may also suggest that as a newly married man’s brain chooses to forget the worst decisions he made as a single person, he can later truthfully answer certain questions from his children, should he be asked, which in my opinion is one of the great unexpected perks of being married.
For example, let’s say a young high school aged girl is listening to her parents visit about a story reported in a local newspaper about a young man being cited for trying to outrun the police, and the girl’s father comments, “That was a dumb thing to do!”
And when the daughter (of which I have two) curiously interjects and asks her father, “Did you ever do anything like that before you met Mom?”
The father can truthfully answer, “Not that I remember.”
Which, if the child is listening, is not the same as a hard “no”.
Subtle differences exist for a reason.
That’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it.