Untangling a Memory Knot

Do you remember how you celebrated Memorial Day when you were a child? And what difference does it make to know? Traditionally, for me, Memorial Day marked the end of the school year. It was the official beginning of Summer Vacation, and worthy of celebration for that reason alone, especially since, rather amazingly, none of the many veterans in our family lost their lives while serving their country.

This question arose just just now as I wrote about my high school graduation in my journal. I graduated from high school on May 28, and the next day I went home with my grandparents to spend the several days between graduation and the first day of my summer job. My parents came to pick me up ... when? Memorial Day weekend? That didn’t seem possible. There isn’t time for Memorial Day weekend if I graduated on May 28.

My compulsive need for accurate details kicked in. I set my journal aside, reached for my nearby laptop, and googled over to a perpetual calendar to refresh my memory regarding the day of the week that May 28 fell on that year. Although perpetual calendars are enormously valuable for unraveling many mysteries, it didn’t help with this one. A few more clicks turned up the explanation that Memorial Day was always celebrated as a stand-alone holiday on May 30 until the passage of the Uniform Holiday Act in 1971 that created all the lovely three day weekend holidays we enjoy now.

Thus Memorial Day was not a long weekend back then as I’d been thinking. It was the First Day of Summer Vacation — unless it fell on a Sunday, in which case it was the Second Day of Summer Vacation.

What difference does all this make? It’s a prime example of how memories morph and blur. I forgot that we didn’t always have that three day weekend. It probably blurred together with Labor Day, which marked the official end of summer vacation — it was carved in stone that we return to the classroom the Tuesday after Labor Day, which has always has always been celebrated on the first Monday of September, ensuring a three day weekend.

If I had written in the Los Alamos Years memoir I’m tapping away on that my parents came up to pick me up over Memorial Day weekend, nobody would ever have thought twice about it, and it would have been true enough. That claim expresses personal truth, supported by the reality of memory. If anyone checked a few decades from now, at worst they’d figure I’d gotten a little wifty and let it go.

Since tools for determining factual truth are easily available, with about four minutes of searching, I was able to set the record straight. I can keep my account accurate, and perhaps insert a little historical insight by including half a dozen words about the history of the holiday date change.

Although this is a personal decision, when accurate facts are readily available, I feel better when I make the effort to find and use them. When the facts are not available, memory and considered speculation will suffice, though if I have serious doubts, I may qualify such statements with a phrase like as I recall... .

Write now: click over to a perpetual calendar and use it to determine the day of the week for significant events in your life. For example, do you remember what day of the week you were born? How about your children? What day of the week was JFK assassinated? Conversely, if you remember the time of month something took place, for example, the third week of August, you can probably find the date using the perpetual calendar. You can file these dates away for future reference, or just know that this tool is always there.

Alternatively or additionally, write about your feelings about technical accuracy in matters like this. How important is it to you?

African Adventure

Namibian village woman, photo by SL

I began writing this post at the beginning of an eighteen-hour plane trip home from a whirlwind tour of Southern Africa. I'm full of fresh memories backed up in a journal full of observations and experiences, thousands of photos, a few dozen video clips, and over a gigabyte of sound recordings of various things. Then there are the brochures, maps and other paper my husband accrued. No trip I've ever been on has been more thoroughly documented. I have enough material to keep me writing for weeks or months on end.

The adventure began with a sixteen-hour flight from Dulles International to Johannesburg, broken by a refueling stop in Dakar, Senegal half-way through the flight. We spent more than half our time in South Africa, visiting Pretoria, Soweto (where we visited Nelson Mandela's historical home, just down the block from Desmond Tutu's residence — the only street in the world with homes of two Nobel Peace Prize recipients), Cape Town, the Cape of Good Hope, Stellenbosch (home of the thriving and excellent South African wine industry and a top four South African university), Uhmlanga (a Durban suburb), and Kruger National Park. We also visited Chobe National Park in Botswana, Victoria Falls in sadly oppressed Zimbabwe, and made a shorts visits to Namibia and Zambia.

One highlight of the trip took me by surprise. I would not have planned on my own to visit to the prison on Robben Island where non-white apartheid political prisoners were held, but it turned out to be memorable and moving. During a tour conducted by a man who was an inmate there for fourteen years, we saw the cell where Nelson Mandela spent eighteen years, and heard first-hand about the solidarity that developed among the men there and their collaboration in educating one another. The visit concluded with his stirring and sincere-sounding testimony that in spite of the horrors they endured, they bear no grudge, and feel genuine goodwill toward all men today.

Other highlights included a short visit to an elementary school in Victoria Falls, where students from a culture class performed amazing native dances for us and we sang our national anthems for each other. Perhaps due to the sacrifice their families make to send them to school, these children seemed more than usually engrossed in their studies. We enjoyed a sampler dinner of typical native foods, including mopani worms, at the home of a Zimbabwe family, rode an elephant, and petted lions. Most especially, we enjoyed the National Parks where we saw thousands of impala, hundreds of elephants, dozens of giraffes and zebras, and all sorts of other exotic animals running free. I've posted several videos of these animals and some tribal dancers on YouTube.

The trip acquired personal meaning far beyond the planned activities and experiences. Equally memorable were snippets of information, much of it dark in nature, gleaned along the way, like the twenty-five percent unemployment and soaring crime rates in South Africa and the total ruin of the Zimbabwe economy under the rule of Mugabe, who has not relinquished power even after being voted out of office. Zimbabwe recently adopted the United States dollar as their official currency. In contrast, Botswana is healthy and prosperous, with the soundest economy in Africa and one of the strongest worldwide. Conversations and chance encounters with locals during free time roaming also added zest and perspective. I have come to realize that the world really is one huge community, though one with many differences.

My perceptions, interpretations, and tales will take some time to settle and digest into vignettes and essays. As I get around to writing about them, my variety of memory joggers — audio, visual and written, will be a huge help, and even if I never write about them, creating this backlog of information about the trip has helped reinforce the memories. It was worth the slight effort if only for that reason.

All of these memories will be enriched by the delightful group of people we traveled with. The trip would not be the same without the mosaic of personalities involved, especially Jo and Violet, octagenarians who enthusiastically dared to ride the zip line across the gorge below Victoria Falls from Zambia to Zimbabwe. You gals set a high standard, and you are my heroines! Cheers to those of my fellow travelers who happen to click over and visit here. Please don't forget my encouragement to write the stories of your own lives.

Write now: a few well-seasoned memories of your own travels, wherever they took you, be that the good old USA, or further afield. Write about what you learned from these experiences as well as what you did. Explore how they changed you and helped you grow.

Gone Adventuring

I'm off on an adventure.

Back soon.

Stay tuned.