Perhaps Blessed By A Near-Perfect Memory

Anyone who has ever thought about it realizes that immortality would be a curse; everyone you have ever known is dead, you’ve seen it all before, and there is the question of your physical health. Fiction and imagination generally take care of all these factors, but the basic idea is icky.

If you have eidetic (perfect) memory, I suspect it is, in its own way, just a bit of a curse. Forgetting is an important part of being human. The luckiest remember the wonderful moments and forget the terrible moments. To remember everything cannot be easy on you mind.

Of course eidetic memory is great for academics; to be able to see entire pages of the textbook makes it difficult to fail.

My memory is not a curse, but it does regularly surprise and baffle those around me. If I had a dollar for every time someone said “I don’t remember that, but it sounds like me,” I’d be a wealthy man.

Which brings me (as everything does) to me. It is probably easy to remember your first real kiss (as in my song by that name), and other epochal kisses. Do you remember their names, and the location; (vividly, as if you can still see it?)

The question came to me while reading a Curtis Sittenfeld[1] short story. She describes a woman’s 25-year marriage to a man whom she doesn’t enjoy kissing. Now that’s a tragedy.

I remember my first real kiss: a peck on the cheek planted on KSI in 2nd grade; she slapped me as we stood on the north steps of Beaumont Elementary in my home town of Portland. My nose bled at night for a week, but I learned a life lesson I never forgot: always say “May I,” unless she is the initiator.

The first time a girl kissed me was on the front porch of her home, south of Fremont St., somewhere in the 40s. It was middle school, and she was exotic: the daughter of a peripatetic single mother, who attended my middle school for a few months. I would kill to remember her name. But I remember the kiss.

My first French kiss was with BH, on the front porch of my home in the early evening of a winter day. I had a hopeless, unrequited crush on the woman I took to my junior and senior prom (and who took me to hers). That was a major highlight of our friendship.

And along the lines of memory (albeit not kisses), my daughters are impressed that I can remember the name of a woman I dated twice in 1977.

Maybe I remember her because she said, “I don’t sleep with men on the first date; I’m a Republican.” I can see her in her San Francisco apartment; the evening gloom behind her, her grand piano in front of her. I’ve been declined several times (“No” is a complete sentence), but her’s was both the most eccentric and classiest.

My daughters figured out I remembered her after I wrote a blurb for her novel. “You know this woman? How?”

My memory allows me to bask in the glow of the wonderful moments of my life, and contemplate the lessons learned from the less-wonderful ones.

[1] Among her many works, my favorite is Rodham, including a description of loving someone for their brains and a blazingly accurate description of The National Press Corps.