I can't remember...

I read this article today about a woman with an extraordinary memory – but not a memory for useful things like names or numbers or chemical formulas or grocery lists… but she COULD remember what she was doing on any given day of her life. She actually wrote a memoir, which I can only assume is tediously boring – because aren’t MOST of the days in MOST of our lives pretty mundane? Every now and then something interesting or unusual will happen, but for the most part, the days of a person’s life consist of things like going to work, buying groceries, watching TV, putting gas in the car, reading books, cleaning the bathroom, going out to dinner, etc… in other words, not the stuff good memoirs are made of.

I’ve always felt that my OWN memory was a bit too good. I may not be able to recall what I was doing every single day of my life (although I’m sure most of my days have been pretty boring, anyway), but I CAN seem to recall just about every bad/sad/embarrassing/painful/heartbreaking event in my past. I think I read once (if my great memory is correct) that our ability to recall bad memories more easily than good ones is the brain’s way of preventing those bad things from happening again. It might be nice to remember every detail of a great vacation or a happy get-together, but it’s not really beneficial in any way (except for conjuring up wistful longings for more vacations, hopefully securing the likelihood of a future journey). But if we can vividly recall all the stupid things we’ve done, or the things that have caused us much misery, we’re less likely to do those same things again. (Like the time I accidentally spilled a jar of honey all over my bare feet right before I stepped into a fire ant hill… won’t be doing THAT again… I’ll keep MY jars of honey in the house where they belong, thank you very much…) Okay, maybe that didn’t really happen… but you get the point…

Fortunately, I have a pretty good memory for the GOOD things in my life, too. When I was kid, I loved to read books and then give a chapter-by-chapter recap to whoever would listen. I’m thinking that MAY have been a bit annoying. So nowadays, when someone asks, “what was that book about?” I try to condense my response into a more reasonable length. But the memory is still there. If I wrote my OWN tediously boring memoirs, I would have plenty of material… random memories from my life pop up at random times – like flash cards, or a shuffled set of photos. At the most bizarre moments and for no reason whatsoever, I’ll suddenly remember things… like the time I got my ears pierced when I was seven years old, and made a point to wear my hair up the next day when I went to school – I then deliberately visited the desk of my friend Eve several times until she noticed. Or the time we went to the Toronto Zoo and Eric and I befriended a funny seal who liked to mimic our movements (and who, for some reason, we decided to name Andy). Or that time I was sitting at my desk at work and one of my co-workers exclaimed, “I thought you were about eighteen!” when he discovered I was well into my twenties. Or the day we brought Echo home from the breeder’s house, and she spent the whole car ride trying to climb up onto my shoulders (when she was a puppy, that was totally ADORABLE).

It’s all just a mishmash of arbitrary stuff, but somehow I manage to retain it all. So you can imagine my confusion when my dentist’s office called me last week, to “confirm my appointment” for next Monday. I am fairly certain – no, I’m pretty darn positive – that I never MADE an appointment for next Monday. In the realm of “things that stick in my memory,” dentist/doctor appointments maintain an edge over other recollections, just because I hate them so much (please see the paragraph about easily remembering bad stuff…). I just don’t forget things like that, because I tend to obsess over things I worry about. So if I’d made a dentist’s appointment, it would’ve popped into my mind at various random times up until the point I had to jump into the car and drive to the office. So where did the mysterious dentist’s appointment come from??

I don’t know, but this is SO going in my memoirs…