Someone asked me what was the busiest day I can remember over the last ten years. Last ten years? You’re kidding, right?
The asker was lacking enough decades. She didn’t realize this was an impossible question. When you are 20, your memories are crisp and sharp and you know you will never forget them.
Unless you die young, you will forget them. I can personally guarantee it.
I can’t remember what I did yesterday, much less in the course of an entire 10-year period.
Hectic? What’s hectic? The decades have all been riddled with crises. Financial, medical, personal. I don’t remember the sequence of a particular day, not even yesterday. Or this morning. It’s nearly one in the afternoon. I’m still answering email and trying to get this silly little post written.
Maybe I should think about this in bigger pieces, like decades? Anyone who asks this question obviously hasn’t lived for many decades. I’m sure having fewer decades to remember might make the whole memory thing more … memorable. By the time you’ve survived seven or eight decades, you would never ask this question. You would know your friends feel lucky to get to the end of a sentence without having to pause to remember what word comes next.
I can tell you — I think — which period in my life was the most hectic. It started in 1963 and slowed down … when was that? Wait for it. I’m thinking. Okay, got it. It hasn’t slowed down. But it would be okay with me if it did.
Life, as the beaver said, is just one dam thing after another.
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Categories: Blackstone River, Cartoons, Dams and Waterfalls, Humor
Serendipity Seeking Intelligent Life on Earth 
It doesn’t just happen with life, but with certain segments of life one is heavily invested in. For example, when I first started my blog… for the first year or two of it, I could remember pretty much everything I had posted and about when I posted it. I knew all of my followers, when I first found them…. all that good stuff.
After almost 8 years…. I couldn’t tell you what I posted last week. Or if I even remembered to answer my comments on whatever it was I posted. The “toilet paper roll” effect of time passage and how we perceive it works on just about everything…
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So dam true! 🙂
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At 20 you only have one decade and part of the first to remember.
Leslie
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Which is probably why we remember so much of our earliest years better than later ones. Time moved slowly when we were children but with each passing year, it whizzes by faster. Whoosh went 2016 through 2018. Literally, I barely remember them.
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and then there’s 2019….2020 soon to follow…
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Whoosh, whizz, ZIP!
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2019 is half over…and we haven’t even had a summer yet…
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I work with a gal (some 15 years younger than me), who remembers everything? Seriously? Gimme a break. I only remember the important stuff. That’s my story……
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That’s a specific ability that a few people are born with. It isn’t something you can learn. You got it, or you don’t.
But these people also have a terrible time because they CAN’T forget, even when they want to. How awful is that?
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Thank goodness for cyber help. That is replacing my memory
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If it weren’t for Google, I’d never get finished with a post. When I forget the word, if I can remember something like it or a part of the word Google will find it!
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And I constantly need the translation pages. I often forget the english word or expression and can only remember the german one.
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I suppose that is one of the perils of being multi-lingual. I know a lot of people including children in Israel who spoke five, six, seven languages — some fluently, others less well. There was a 10-year-old girls from Russia who spoke 7 languages. Russian, Polish, Bulgrian — these are all are similar, apparently — German, English and French. And she could find her way through a couple of other Romance languages too. Her family had been “nation hopping” for a while and she just picked up languages. English mostly from TV. That’s why almost everyone in Israel spoke some degree of English. Yes, they taught it in school, but mostly, TV shows did the job. As for Arabic, even I learned some of it, just on the street. You hear it a lot, you pick up enough words to go shopping, have a simple pleasant chat. You don’t learn the finer points exactly, but you will learn some of it. Garry knows a bit of (or used to, anyway) Vietnamese and a reasonable amount of Spanish, which also means he can make out a lot of French because other than the accent and parts of the grammar, they are similar enough. He’d probably pick up Italian, if he had access to it.
But I saw a LOT of Native Anglophiles who had lost most of their English. Especially those who either came as children or who took jobs where they worked primarily in Hebrew. It was one of the things that made me afraid to really dive into the language. English wasn’t just my language: it was my rapier and my tool. I could NOT afford to lose it.
At least they HAVE translators now. Imagine when they didn’t have them available. That must have made it awfully hard to figure out what to say!
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I wouldn’t be able to ask that question either. In fact, I’m hopeless with questions that ask me to choose just one experience over many others. How can I when I can’t remember them all at once? I’m sure that like a giant a giant database our memories have filed everything that ever happened to us but that doesn’t mean I know how to access it at will. If you asked me what was my busiest day I’d probably go back to the most recent one but was that the busiest ever? Probably not, how could I be sure?
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We’ve done a LOT of stuff through the years. Of course we don’t remember all of it. How could anyone over the age of 21 not understand that? I remember periods of time … and sometimes a forgotten memory pops up but otherwise, most of the old memories are archived.
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You’re so right. It’s difficult to remember yesterday, much less last year. And a decade……
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I kind of remember decades but details have gotten fuzzy. And it isn’t dementia. It’s good old-fashioned TIME. Older events get buried behind newer memories and ultimate wind up in archives. We can dig them out if we really need to, but mostly, we are busy enough living now without trying to restore all of our yesterdays.
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But sometimes, the memories of the past are more clear than those of yesterday. I have seen it with a few people.
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Some memories are, others are just gone. I can remember the words to songs I learned before Kindergarten, but not daily events that occurred. I remember a lot of it rather piecemeal now … plus aging makes you forget words a lot. Not that you have forgotten them. It’s like the cogs slip and your word disappears. You KNOW the word. It’s right there in your head, but you can’t quite GRAB it. It is infuriating. Google really helps because if you can remember something related to it, what you need is going to pop up. I can’t even imagine how people functioned without something like Google to remind them of what they forgot (for the moment).
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I know, I forget the simplest of everyday use words and then I have to google them. And sometimes something you have forgotten and have tried to remember will just randomly pop in your mind.
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It’s the archives. Sometimes, pieces of archived data slip out and “OH there’s an idea and a memory!”
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Exactly!
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