Part 2: Reconstructing the days of your life

Last time I posed this question: If you were able to replay any given day of your life (starting at an age when you are capable of remembering things), would you be able to recall at least one thing that happened on that day? I postulated that I think I’d be able to recall something—at least one thing—from the large majority of the days of my life. However, I did not express rock-solid confidence in this speculation.

Today I want to examine this question from a different angle—not in terms of replaying a day in your life, but rather by taking a distant memory or event and trying to pinpoint the exact day on which it happened. Let’s look at a few examples.

In a recent blog entry, I shared a memory from my early childhood about a day when I forgot to pay for my milk in the cafeteria. My question now is this: Is there any way that I can figure out the day (or even the month) that this episode took place?

I think you can readily see that this is a difficult task. In many cases it would be impossible to determine the exact day on which an event or memory took place. But as I have pondered this whole idea over the past twenty years or so, I have come to the conclusion that many memories and events are possible to reconstruct—even more than I initially thought. Doing so is like doing detective work, and sources such as family and the internet are very helpful.

Let’s look at my “forgot-to-pay-for-my-milk” experience. This is what I know: I know it happened when I was in first grade, so it happened in either 1972 or 1973. And it was a school day, so it happened sometime between Monday and Friday. And that’s about all I can say about it. Suppose, though, that I reminisced about this with my parents, and my mom said something like, “I remember that day very well. You came home from school and told me all about it. I had been sad about Aunt Matilda’s death the previous day, and this cheered me up.” Well, then, in that case, I could do some research and find out the day that Aunt Matilda died. Then, Voila!, I would then have “reconstructed” the exact day that the milk event happened. (I don’t really have an Aunt Matilda, it is just an attention-grabbing name used for illustrative purposes.)

What has fascinated me is that I have been able to combine distant memories with corroborating or verifiable facts and have come up with exact dates of events in my life. I recently did a silly experiment in this regard on the subject of rock concerts that I attended in high school and college. By combining the memories of specific conversations with relatives and specific known events in my life, and with the aid of the internet and my college yearbooks, I was able to pinpoint the exact dates of eight different concerts that I attended. For instance, I saw the Police in concert on August 20, 1983, Billy Joel on February 14, 1984, and the Cars on July 16, 1984. The Billy Joel concert is a good example of what I am talking about. I have a very distinct memory of being at that concert on Valentine’s Day, and I remember it was in my senior year of high school. Joel’s past concert dates are available online, so I was easily able to look it up and verify that my memory was correct.

All this has led me to an ambitious idea, and it is where I will leave this subject for now. I have never kept a diary or journal in my life. But all this pondering has persuaded me that I can reconstruct one to a sizable degree. So over time, as memories come back to me, I do a little digging to see if I can verify exact dates of events. And if I can’t get the exact date, I can sometimes narrow it down to a range of dates, or perhaps a particular month. When I can deduce a date or range of dates, I jot it down. And at some point, when I have the time, I'll transfer all of the notes onto an Outlook calendar, or something like that.

In the meantime, I hope I don’t forget where I put all of those notes!

Remembering the days of your life, Part 1

Imagine if you could board a time machine and go back to any day of your life. It could be ten years ago, it could be twenty-five years ago . . . just any random day. Imagine further that you could re-live that day with yourself, observing from a distance everything that happened to you, from the time that you woke up in the morning until the time you set your tired head upon the pillow at night. You could see once again (but not change!) everything that happened to you on that day.

My question is this: For any given day in your past (starting at about the age of five or six, when the human is capable of remembering things), would there be at least one thing that happened that day that you specifically remember? One specific event? One conversation? One thought? Or, are there days in our lives that contain no specific, discernable memories?

Now, you may or may not have thought about this question before, and you may or may not think it is an interesting one. But, in the spirit of confessing my innermost thoughts on the internet for anyone to see, I will say that this is a question that has fascinated me for at least twenty years. I often find myself pondering whether or not, given the chance to replay, say, April 10, 1974, I would say at least one time, “Ah, yes, I specifically remember that!”

The great thing about hypothetical questions is that everyone can give hypothetical answers, and (at least in situations such as this) nobody is wrong. But having contemplated this question for a few decades now (and, by the way, this is the first time I have ever told anyone about this), here is what I think:

I believe that if I could replay every day of my life, in almost all cases (probably more than 95%), I would indeed be able to recall at least one specific memory from that day—a joke that someone told, something a teacher said, a conversation, a fight with one of my sisters (wait, that never happened!), a baseball game, etc. But I do think that there are a very small percentage of days, most of which would be from my early childhood, where I really could not honestly recall one thing. I think I would certainly recall some “constants” of my life during the time periods in question—the wart on my finger, the dent in the back of the Station Wagon, the way that the dog acted when she needed to be let outside, etc. But I would not necessarily remember a specific memory that happened only on that day.

So in the majority of the “days of my life,” I think I could recall a specific memory. But whenever I start to feel confident about this answer, I begin to wonder if I am wrong. Maybe there are more days than I care to admit that have forever become black holes, where, even if I could see a replay of the whole day, nothing would jump out as memorable. Maybe I would only be able to recall a specific memory from 75% of the days of my life, or maybe 50%. But I rather think that there is more information (including specific memories) packed into our brains than we tend to think, which drives me back to my original conclusion.

Indeed my uncertainty over this is what has led me to ponder it for so long. What do you think? (To be continued . . .)

January grab bag

As the subtitle of my blog suggests, I write a lot about the various thoughts that I have while driving to work every day. Some days there are some very specific, serious things on my mind, and other days it’s just a veritable smorgasbord of half-baked ideas. Here’s what I mean.

On Wednesday (Jan. 13th), I was twice greeted with “Happy New Year.” The fact that it happened twice struck me as odd because it is the middle of January already. Time is indeed flying. This caused me to ask myself the following question: How long into the new year must we go before we don’t have to say “Happy New Year” anymore? I guess the answer varies, but in most cases I think the greeting kind of fades after about January 5th, when everybody is back to work, school, and the normal routine. One of the instances I experienced on the 13th was at a meeting of individuals who had not met together since early December. This was the first time we were all assembled in the new year. So the “Happy New Year” greeting made sense. But if we had not had our first 2010 meeting until mid-February, would we still have been greeted with a “Happy New Year?” I doubt it. Thus, there must be a cut-off point somewhere.

Speaking of time flying, another thought floated through my mind on the way to work the other day. Do you realize that with the turn of the decade, we are already 1% of the way through the next millennium? I don’t know about you, but I find that to be amazing. One percent may not seem like a lot, but we’re talking about a millennium here. Let me put it this way. If you asked me to make a comparison as to how far into this millennium we are, my guess would be something like a handful of sand along a stretch of beach. After all, a millennium is a thousand years! Before the year 2000, the last change of millennium was during the time of Leif Ericson and before the Battle of Hastings! So, the fact that we are “already” 1% of the way to the year 3000 astounds me.

On my half-hour commute to and from work, I spend about fifteen minutes each way listening to the Bible on CD. After that, I do a lot of radio channel surfing, always looking for a favorite tune. I normally cycle through eight or nine stations, ranging from oldies to rock to contemporary Christian. Occasionally, as I quickly skip from station to station, I’ll experience the strange phenomenon of two stations playing the same song at the same time, or nearly simultaneously (say within a few minutes of each other). That’s kind of weird, because most of these stations have playlists of thousands of songs. Is this coincidence? Perhaps, but in my mind it happens too often to be mere coincidence. My theory is that, like anyone doing any job, disc jockeys periodically get bored, check out what’s going on at the other stations, hear a particular song they like, and decide to slide it right into their own show. That’s just my theory.

A recent coincidence in this vein was when, on three consecutive mornings, I heard Blondie’s “The Tide is High” on my way to work. If you remember this song, I think you’ll agree that it is one of the catchiest tunes ever, and once it gets into your head, it’s hard to get it out. So, there I am on the third day, at work, singing “The Tide is High” all day long. I couldn’t stop. And let me tell you, it’s kind of embarrassing when some fifty-five year old dude who sits in a cubicle just a few feet away hears another grown man singing, “I’m not the kind of girl who gives up just like that.”

I hope everyone enjoys their MLK Day holiday weekend.