I have written before about the differential nature of memory, but I’d like to add a few thoughts. Frank Bruni and I share experiences in this regard, so I am sure it is not unique to me.

Because of my excellent long-term memory (and sometimes from ancient journals), I frequently tell people about epochal effects their words or actions from decades ago remain with me still. The typical response: “I don’t remember, but that sounds like me.” (the IDR response)

Another example:  in 1964 I was selling The Beech Street Bugle, a four-page mimeographed newspaper bearing the same name as my father’s paper 18 years earlier.¹ One of my readers was Cathy. I know it was 1964, because The Bugle ran an editorial endorsing Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater. ²

She was a good writer.³ She pointed out that I had started a sentence with the word “and” and told me not to do that. Fifteen years later, after a variety of amateur jobs (a few hundred thousand words), I felt a little thrill when my first professional sentence starting with the word “and” made it into the trade journal I was working for.⁴

Cathy and I had lunch a few times several years ago, when I had looked her up out of curiosity. I told her I had never forgotten that rule, and she game me the IDR response, and also said that a half-century later she wasn’t even sure it was good advice.

CONTINUED HERE

(or to put it another way

1. 1. Sold to many of the same people, that’s how stable our neighborhood was. ↩︎
2. 2. No doubt my editorial was responsible for Johnson’s landslide. Ironic, since his nickname in Texas was Landslide Lyndon (meant sarcastically, since his first election was a squeaker) ↩︎
3. 3. As evidenced by her years at the Associated Press. ↩︎
4. 4. Probably because its copy editing wasn’t up to AP, UPI and the Oregon Journal ↩︎