Memory

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. --Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

This is a picture of my dad and my brother. I love this photo so much, and though I was probably only about 4 or 5 when it was taken, I do remember that afternoon. Or do I? It could be that I don't really remember it, that my memory is just a blurry amalgamation of so many similar beachy summer days. But isn't memory always flawed like that? Especially memories from your earliest years?

I remember going to the beach in California. We drove to San Diego every summer, and some summers we even went to Anaheim to go to Disneyland. (There's a story my mom tells all the time about how she and my dad decided to surprise us by not telling us where we were going; on the way there she said, "We're going to the happiest place on earth!" to which I replied, "Heaven?")

I remember our big mesh bag of toys that let us dig deep holes before the tide came in. I remember packing wet sand and making towers to construct castles, and I remember this one particular late afternoon where there was practically no one on the beach. I remember we could see a pier in the distance.

Was that the day this picture was taken?

In it you can see the clouds coming in, and the sun looks like it's beginning its descent. Maybe my mom was on her beach towel, reading, telling us we had ten more minutes, and then she took her camera out of her beach bag and snapped this. I must've been next to her, or maybe I was further down collecting seashells or digging my hands in the sand trying to unearth sandcrabs.

Or maybe none of this happened. Maybe this isn't even California. Maybe my mom didn't take this picture. In fact, maybe that isn't even Matt--maybe that's me, which would explain why I'm not in the picture, too. I started out writing this thinking I knew so much about it, but now I'm second-guessing myself. (Mom, can you help me out here?)

I keep this taped to the inside of my day planner (yes, I still have a planner). Sometimes, if I look at it for too long, I feel tears start to well up and my throat gets tight and I think I'm going to cry. Even if my memory is flawed, that isn't the point of this picture. It isn't to remind me of my carefree childhood. It is to remind me of love.

I love the tenderness of it. I love how my dad is leaning down, holding my toddler brother up as the waves come in and try to knock him over. Maybe he was trying to catch the waves with his little bucket. I love how the water glitters, and I love the white crests of the waves. I love how the dry sand, the wet sand, the sea, and the sky perfectly divide the space of this photo into four equal parts, and how the two figures are exactly in the middle. I love their reflection.

Whether it's Matt or me my dad is holding, helping us discover the world, when I look at it I know how much he loves us.

I just wanted to save it here in case something happened to the physical copy, the slightly battered edges, the tape on the back holding it to the inside front cover. If the tape lost its stick, if the photo slipped out of my planner one day while fishing it out of my purse, then that would be it--it would be gone forever. There's no digital camera holding it in its memory card.

Someday this memory will be gone. Hopefully not until I'm dead. But, as you know, when we get older, our memories become more like swiss cheese than sharp cheddar. And the older you get, the more memories you have to store in your brain, and other inconsequential memories get pushed out--like me looking at a pier on the beach in the distance.