aka the Mystery of Memory
I know every word to “Boom Shake the Room” by Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, a song that was on high rotation in the pub/club we frequented in … checks notes … 1993! God, I’m old.
Yo back up now and give a brother room
The fuse is lit and I’m about to go boom!
Mercy mercy, mercy me
My life is a cage but on stage I’m free
The lyrics aren’t noteworthy and certainly aren’t the type of thing that could, by any measure, be considered useful information, and the fact that I can recall it all word for word probably says more about the priorities of my brain than I would like it to.
There are other songs from my teenage years where I can do the same thing. There used to be a quiz, Name That Tune, which would play the opening note or two from a song and I am oddly good at it. My time at hospital radio means I have a strange mix of music knowledge for such things, which includes the entire lyrics of songs that seem to be wedged somewhere in my brain with no sign of them leaving.
All of which is slightly worrying when I consider how much genuinely useful information has subsequently disappeared from said brain.
Ask me what I did a week past Tuesday and I haven’t got a fucking clue.
I know I was working, I probably ate something for lunch, and then after work, no doubt, I played with Jack, had some dinner, then got his bath and bed routine done. But if you want anything more specific then you would need a forensic investigation involving my calendar, emails, and messages. Sure I could reconstruct the day, but that feels rather different from actually remembering it.
I’ve never had a great memory. Yet those song lyrics remain in my brain. Why?
The memories that stick
I can remember making a notebook for the 1986 World Cup in Mexico. I remember filling in the teams and scores, drawing the mascot and taking the whole thing sufficiently seriously that I apparently needed my own little World Cup administration system. I’m sure if I’d had access to a computer and a spreadsheet I would’ve built it there. I can picture my parents’ living room while I was doing it, mapping out the post group stages, who would play whom, all the way to the final.
I can even recall trying to sketch the mascot, which was a large chilli wearing a sombrero with a heavily styled moustache, if memory serves me correctly (I just checked, and yup, there he is, apparently called Pique!)
This notebook was something I did once. I never repeated it for any other World Cup.
Yet, some forty years later, it’s still there in my brain and every time there is a World Cup I can recall that little notebook — technically it was a pilfered school jotter, the joys of having teachers for parents.
And to compare that forty-year-old memory against last Tuesday, it’s safe to say that the notebook wins out, whilst Tuesday has already disappeared into the general category of “things that happened in my past”.
The obvious answer is that memory doesn’t particularly care what I consider important. I have many dull workday Tuesdays, but there is only one “Boom Shake the Room” which has been heard hundreds of times, with the melody, rhythm, rhyme and repetition all helping to drag line after line out of my brain at the drop of a hat.
Hyped up, psyched up, ready for wilin’
Standing in a crowd of girls like an island
I see the one I wanna sic come here cutie
I flip ’em around and then I work that booty
The World Cup notebook had different advantages. I was young, it was unusual, I was interested in football, I was making something, the World Cup was happening and I was sitting in a particular room surrounded by things associated with my childhood. That’s a lot of hooks for one memory.
In comparison it’s fair to say that last Tuesday had considerably less going for it.
The bit I actually worry about
I don’t really care about not being able to remember boring days from my past, a disappearing Tuesday is not my concern.
What bothers me rather more about my failing memory is when I think about Jack.
He’s almost five and there are things about him now that I desperately want to remember, partly because I know this particular version of him is temporary. He won’t always talk like this — Becca and I are already sad for the day when he learns to pronounce certain words properly, right now ‘Nodoby’ remains a level of cute we are not ready to leave behind — and he won’t have this particular combination of curiosity, confidence, nonsense and complete disregard for whatever it was I thought we were supposed to be doing when we play. I love his mind, and I love sitting with him whilst he explores something.
And I’m sad that I already know I won’t remember all of it.
What if I forget when he took his first steps?
Not the fact that he took them; there is a video of that moment, and plenty of photographs and stories from the following days to confirm it happened. I am more worried that I will forget what it was actually like to see it happen.
What if I remember the fact but lose the experience, the room, what he was wearing, the expression on his face, that slightly ridiculous way toddlers move when they’re trying to work out how legs are supposed to operate?
More importantly, what if I can’t remember me seeing it?
That’s the part I want to keep. Not just the photograph, but the little jolt of excitement and wonder I felt when he finally walked, when he finally put all the pieces of physical motion together right in front of me, the sense of pride mixed with a hint of disbelief that he’d just taken a, literal, step towards a bigger world.
I can still remember the emotions and the sense of excitement from my World Cup notebook. Not just the thing I made (that’s lost to the mists of time), but 13 year old me, sitting in my parents’ living room, completely absorbed in that particular little world I’d created.
I want some future version of me to be able to do the same with Jack. I don’t want to just remember that he was four, I want to remember him, all his mannerisms, speech patterns, and expressions.
Maybe I haven’t forgotten
That said, I’m not sure my memory is as bad as I fear. There is a slightly more reassuring possibility.
I’m sure you’ve all experienced it, that moment when a photograph, a smell, a song, a name or a familiar place can unlock something you haven’t consciously remembered for years, and suddenly you’re somewhere else entirely.
Becca had this exact thing the other day. She’d bought new soap and upon first use she came downstairs with a little smile on her face and told me it reminded her of her favourite aunt’s bathroom soap. She’d been transported back to her childhood in an instant.
So, maybe some memories aren’t completely gone, maybe I just need to find a route to get back to them?
And perhaps that’s what will happen with Jack. I won’t remember every breakfast, every trip to the park or every silly game, but some of those things may become part of a larger memory of this period of his life, waiting for the right cue to bring something specific back.
A photograph of a particular jumper, a song we listened to, a toy that disappeared years ago, something he said, a familiar room, and suddenly I’m there again. Hopefully.
Pay attention
However, I think there’s another explanation for my terrible memory that I find slightly more uncomfortable because it doesn’t involve blaming my age.
Perhaps I don’t remember last Tuesday because I wasn’t really paying attention to last Tuesday.
I get it. Modern adult life is full of divided attention. I’m doing one thing while thinking about another, checking my phone, remembering something I need to do later, thinking about work, pondering what to have for lunch or wondering why I’ve walked into a room. An experience can happen without being particularly well encoded as a memory.
It’s a little like complaining that my phone hasn’t got a photograph of something when I never opened the camera.
Perhaps I haven’t forgotten last Tuesday, perhaps I just barely recorded enough information about it for it to ‘stick’ because I wasn’t that bothered about it. It was just a Tuesday.
I don’t particularly want to remember everything, but I wonder if I can pay more attention to the things I know I’ll want to remember. When Jack says something funny, I need to be listening to him to encode it. When he does something for the first time, I need to be watching to notice it. And when we’re sitting somewhere together and nothing particularly important is happening, maybe I should try and notice that too, because one day that completely ordinary moment will be a memory I wish I still had.
I just hope there is room in there amongst all the other things my brain ‘chooses’ to remember…
Work the body, work work the body
Slow down girl, you’re ’bout to hurt somebody
Hol’ up yo, let’s get just one thing clear
There’s only one reason why I came here
The bookmarks
Maybe this is just what getting older feels like, becoming aware of the gaps in my memory.
There are entire days I’ll never remember, conversations that have vanished, places I’ve been that I couldn’t describe, meals I’ve eaten, people I’ve met, things I apparently found hilarious that I now have absolutely no recollection of.
And yet some tiny, completely arbitrary things remain, like that afternoon in my parents’ living room with the Mexico World Cup notebook, or a song I first heard forty years ago.
It’s almost as though my life has been reduced to a collection of bookmarks, with most of the pages between them missing. Maybe that’s inevitable, maybe it’s even necessary. If every moment remained equally vivid, nothing would be vivid; the extraordinary would be buried beneath thousands of completely ordinary experiences.
So perhaps forgetting isn’t the opposite of memory, but part of how to manage it.
Which brings me back to Boom Shake the Room.
If I were designing a system for deciding what information should remain in my brain for the next forty years, I don’t think I’d have put that song particularly high on the list.
And yet there it is, perfectly preserved, while huge chunks of last week have already disappeared into the fog. Information that may be more useful eludes me, yet…
Ya really done want me to tig-a-tig-a-tig-a tell ya wassup (Go)
Ya really done want me to tig-a-tig-a-tig-a tell ya wassup (Go)
Ya really done want me to tig-a-tig-a-tig-a tell ya wassup (Go)
I came here tonight to hear the crowd go…
Maybe that doesn’t mean my memory is failing. I guess memory was never intended to be a diary. Memory is selective and associative for good reason, even if those reasons seem deeply weird, and it seems to care much more about whether something was distinctive, repeated, emotional or connected to something else than whether future me would consider it useful.
I guess it would be nice to have had a little more control over those decisions but I don’t know if brains work that way.
So perhaps, twenty years from now, I’ll find an old photograph of Jack at four and suddenly remember something about an afternoon I had completely forgotten, not the photograph itself but what it felt like to be there.
That would be more than enough for me, being able to transport myself back to those days when we’d cuddle on the sofa, or back to the early nights when he fell asleep on me so happily.
I don’t need to remember every day. I just want to remember some of them, and whilst I may not be able to recall specific ones, I am already confident that there are enough in my brain that have already been pulled into view by seeing a photograph, or an old toy, that I probably don’t need to worry.
So I guess the rest, last Tuesday and more, can probably go.
Although, apparently, I am contractually obliged to retain the complete lyrics of a particular DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince magnum opus until death.
Boom! shake-shake-shake the room
Boom! shake-shake-shake the room
Boom! shake-shake-shake the room
Tic-tic-tic-tic boom!
What are your thoughts?