fluid memories

What’s funny about that Soul Train memory—or tragic, depending on your sense of humor—is that small memories like that can permanently distort your perspective.

It was all I could do to get through each moment, and each moment felt like an endless hour, yet days slipped silently past. Time unused and only endured still vanishes, as if time itself is starving, and each day is swallowed whole, leaving no crumbs, no memory, no trace at all.

the form of the photo encourages remembrance, but the content remains outside our memory.

What are the smells you remember that even in memory make you stop a moment and breathe deeply, or that make your heart beat more vigorously, your palms ache for what’s been lost? Write these down. Write as quickly as you can, seeing how one smell leads to another. What kinds of images, memories, or stories might arise from this sensory trigger?

Memory itself could be called its own bit of creative nonfiction. We continually—often unconsciously—renovate our memories, shaping them into stories that bring coherence to chaos.

Memory begins to qualify the imagination, to give it another formation, one that is peculiar to the self. … If I were to remember other things, I should be someone else. —N. SCOTT MOMADAY

By the way, I’m also finding that there’s a Doppler effect in personal memory. The normal Doppler effect, the one we all learn about in high school, happens when an ambulance comes toward you on the street. Because the distance the sound needs to travel is shrinking as it approaches you, the frequency of the sound waves is compressed, so it sounds

The snapshot is meant to preserve not just an image but the moment of its taking; its intention is not documentary so much as memorial, and when we look at it we are remembering more than we are actually seeing.