“Memory is a fight.”
— Lucas Mann
My mother and I sit together, comfortably sunk in a pair of club chairs in her living room as we enjoy a glass of Pinot Noir before Sunday supper. Her legs are crossed, while mine stretch out toward the flames of the gas fireplace. Hours earlier I came across an old 8×10-inch black-and-white photo of me and a clutch of other little girls standing among potted tulips, each of us wearing a dress and Mary Janes and holding an Easter basket. The photo, preserved in a folder stamped with the Cerromar Beach Hotel logo, was taken in 1970, when I was five and my brother was seven. We were on a family vacation in Puerto Rico.
“I remember so much about that trip,” I tell my mother now, “like having to do that Easter egg hunt and feeling really shy.”
“Oh, yes,” she says, “and visiting the fort in Old San Juan.”
“And swimming in that turquoise water,” I add, feeling the undertow’s lasso around my ankles.
“Those little lizards running all over the place.”
“My eyes turning green.”
My mother, owl-like, swivels her head to look at me. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“You know,” I say. My gaze locks on the flames, the bumpy faux logs. “My eyes. On that trip. They turned green.”
My mother emits a one-syllable laugh, more like a cough, and turns back to the fire. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she says.
My throat feels like it’s been ratcheted a notch too tight. I stand up and take my wineglass to the kitchen. I open the oven door and peer at the bubbling lasagna. I drop my head, take a few mindful breaths, close the oven door. I carry plates, silverware, and napkins to the dining room table and set two places, careful not to clatter. I pour myself more wine. I sit down by the fire again.
“Shall we watch Downton Abbey after dinner?” I ask, my voice two notes higher than normal.
“That sounds fine.”
The trip my mother and I are talking about happened 45 years before this pre-Downton Abbey dinner, but much of it remains clear to me: the Eastern Air Lines jet, with its two-tone blue stripe and open gangway, the smack of heat off the tarmac in Miami, the buzzy whine of the cramped propeller plane as it touched down in San Juan, the cool marble of the hotel lobby, the pulsing of a sunburn so severe my brother and I could only lie in our shuttered hotel room for a day, limbs flung out from our bodies, like shipwrecked sailors on life rafts.
But here’s the most important thing I remember about Puerto Rico: it’s where my blue eyes turned green.
At least, that’s what my father told me. He said it in passing a few years after that trip, as though it were an established fact. Puerto Rico, where you got your green eyes.
Regardless of my mother’s doubt, this is a memory I choose to believe. This is a memory I need to believe. This is a memory I remember.
Or do I?
Memory, writes Rebecca Solnit, “is a shifting, fading partial thing, a net that doesn’t catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don’t exist.” Over the past hundred years, psychologists and neuroscientists have taught us a great deal about the human memory system — and its fallibility. We know, for instance, that a memory is the fruit of three processes: encoding, storage, and retrieval. But when we retrieve, or call up, a memory, we aren’t sliding in a VHS tape and watching a recording of exactly what happened. Instead we are piecing together things we’ve learned, convictions we’ve acquired, and bits of actual memories and associated information to form what we come to believe is the memory. In other words, remembering is constructive, not reproductive, influenced by who we are when we do the remembering.
To categorize the different ways we misremember, psychologist Daniel Schacter proposed the “seven sins of memory” framework. But he suggests that memory distortion — the recombination of unconnected but relevant memory scraps — may actually be beneficial, helping us to solve problems or make future plans: “A constructive memory is not always a reliable one, but it need not be a dysfunctional one, either.”
Bald, bespectacled, my father was my own Atticus Finch, right down to the suit and briefcase, the stoicism, the celebrated homecoming at the end of the day. This is the man who, when I was young, wrote memos to me on his company letterhead and signed them with his initials. Who drove me into Pittsburgh, where we walked into the Duquesne Club through a side door marked “Ladies’ Entrance” and ordered chilled cups of vichyssoise for lunch. Who sat with me in Three Rivers Stadium as we cheered for Roberto Clemente and Mean Joe Greene. Who taught me how to swing a bat and go long for a pass, how to ride waves at the beach and row a boat on my grandfather’s pond, how to drive a stick shift on the curving, oak-canopied roads in the foothills of the Alleghenies above our western Pennsylvania town. This is the man who told me I could be anything I wanted, including president of the United States, and whether or not I believed it, what mattered was that he did.
“In recollection it seems less memory than dream,” says the narrator of Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Vulnerables, recalling New York City during the pandemic. That is my impression of other people’s earliest memories: dreamlike, charmed, detached, floating. The whiskered face of a great-uncle leaning down for a kiss. A mother’s hands as she carries a basket of lemons in the sun.
My friend Anna can still see herself as a very young child sitting in her family’s windowless upstairs bathroom, the door cracked open to let in the daylight, singing about sunshine. My Alabaman friend Debra recalls being bounced on William Faulkner’s knee as a little girl. My son’s earliest memory is of a snowy winter’s day spent at my parents’ house, the one I grew up in. He is at the kitchen table eating Cheerios in a white bowl when his grandfather, my father, comes in from the cold and bends down so my son can see the long spike of ice resting on his gloved palm. This, he says, is an icicle.
We know, too, that memory and identity are locked in a pas de deux of reciprocal influence: who we are shapes our memories, and our memories help shape who we believe ourselves to be.
In the early days of my marriage, to a French man who’d spent the first seven years of his life in North Africa, we would sit around the table after a holiday meal at his parents’ apartment in Paris. He would crack open walnut shells, his brother would pit dates, and I would stuff the dates with walnut pieces while their parents reminisced about life in Morocco in the late 50s and early 60s, before they moved to Algiers, before the Algerians’ fight for independence drove the French back to France. In their telling, Rabat was all sunshine and sea breezes, palm trees and carriage rides, fried dough sold by the sidewalk vendor in the port. Every day was a blue-skied Sunday.
Now, France’s war with Algeria long lost, living under the low and leaden Parisian sky, they must have felt their circumstances to be less glorious, more mundane. It was as though they had distilled the memories of those years down to their sensuous essence. It was the meaning they made of something irretrievably left behind, a way of reclaiming their Paradise Lost. Who would they be without that?
Another memory: my father and I lie side by side on the big back porch, each of us in a blue nylon JCPenney sleeping bag. It’s after sunset, and the sky still hums with light. The wide sweep of lawn unfurls at our feet, down and down, until it rests at the roots of the mock orange bushes. The scratchy rasp of the cicadas comes to us as it always does — suddenly, as though it has been there all along. Then twilight becomes night, the light at last leaving, the distant mock orange bushes disappearing as the darkness rolls up toward us, bringing coolness and a smell that is wet and green. My father snores, a low, intermittent rumble. I wriggle all the way inside my sleeping bag and hold it closed over my head. With my thumb I slide the switch on my shiny silver flashlight. Suddenly I’m in a painted cave, the pattern of the flannel lining repeating: stream, pine trees, smiling man in a red hunter’s cap. Stream, pines, man.
When I poke my head out I can see stars. I look for Orion, Cassiopeia’s chair, the dippers, but they’re hard to see without my father’s finger tracing lines between them. Down in the darkness where the lawn used to be, the fireflies’ light is like sound, each pulse a note, all the notes making this silent sonata, singing me to sleep.
While I’m happy that my son’s earliest memory is about my dad, should I believe it’s true? Or is it a story based on a thousand different, if similar, moments they shared? Does my friend really remember Faulkner holding her, or has family lore created the illusion of a memory? For that matter, do I truly remember my brother and me folding ourselves up under the china cabinet, chins on knees, so we could meet Santa Claus when he came down the chimney? Or did our parents’ amused retelling — And we found them both right there, sound asleep! — make a movie of it in my mind?
Research shows us that imagining and remembering activate the same regions of the brain. No surprise, then, that our confidence that something happened is reinforced by the very act of imagining it did. “The search for fact may create a fiction,” write the scientists who study imagination inflation, as this phenomenon is known. “Such is the power of imagination.”
But what are we to make of the memories we wish we could forget, the intrusive ones Schacter categorizes as “persistent”? If I remember the thrill, as a little girl, of my father addressing me as “young lady,” I also remember the gut punch of the first time, years later, that I came upon him standing in front of the liquor cabinet, guzzling whisky from the bottle. If I remember placing my small feet on his shoes so he could box-step me around the living room, I also remember him sitting down to dinner in a cloud of boozy fumes as my mother feigned oblivion and the angry teenager I was glared at him, mute with rage. If I remember the warm ember of pride I felt in my gut knowing he was the favorite dad on our Girl Scouts camping trip, I also remember him standing on a patio, stumbling through a slurry toast in front of my wedding party hours before the rehearsal dinner. If I don’t remember the moment of totality, I do remember how the alcohol steadily eclipsed him, until we could barely see his outline behind who he had become. In the darkened chill of that eclipse, he ceased to see me, and I was lost.
At the molecular level, a memory is a physical but ephemeral thing, the result of connections between neurons in the hippocampus and medial temporal lobes. The exact configuration of those connections can never be the same twice. “Each retrieval must be unique,” the author Sallie Tisdale writes, “because the machine itself is always changing, updating, breaking down, repairing.”
Maybe so. But we also know that emotionally charged memories imprint more vividly and lastingly than more neutral ones. When I imagine hearing this phrase, Puerto Rico, where you got your green eyes, my brain lights up in an incandescent burst of synaptic fireworks — one that I have reinforced, internalized, by replaying it again and again.
But over time, Puerto Rico, where you got your green eyes has come to feel less like an accrual of fragments and scraps and more like a whittling-down, a nub. I can no longer remember anything about this moment, no when or where or what-else. So I wonder, and I worry: could the very fixity of this memory be an indication of its falseness?
There’s a social dimension to sharing memories. In recounting your recollection to someone else, how accurate you are is less important than the intimacy and empathy that the telling inspires. Puerto Rico, where you got your green eyes was a red pin in my past pointing to a time when my father still thought I was something special. Why didn’t my mother let me hold on to that? After all, she didn’t just dismiss this memory, she atomized it — pew-pew-pew — with a laser beam of scorn. Pushing the topic felt somehow dangerous, as though the more I might insist, the more she might take away.
This is what I wish I had said to my mother before dinner: I can’t prove it’s true, but you can’t prove it’s not.
Here and there, often with some mental reverse engineering, I have found validation — or, at least, wisps of possibility that my memory is real. In “The Elegant Eyeball,” ophthalmic pathologist John Gamel explains that a blue iris contains no pigment, and that pigment-secreting cells remain inactive during the first few years of life. Aha! I thought when I read the essay. It’s possible that when I was five my irises did begin to ripen from blue to green, triggered by some magical power suspended in the Caribbean’s cyan waters, a magic so self-evident I never questioned it.
Then there’s psychologist Endel Tulving’s theory that memory comes in two forms, episodic and semantic. The former, which he called “mental time travel,” refers to events and experiences we recall, that we can point to. The latter relates to general knowledge, things we know without knowing how we know them: what a dog is, for example. Maybe my father’s saying Puerto Rico, where you got your green eyes is technically an episodic memory, but now I think it’s not. It feels like a semantic memory, something I simply know, like the fact that the moon affects the tides.
After supper, I load the dishwasher, stretch plastic wrap over the leftover lasagna, put it in the refrigerator, wipe the counters. From the den I can hear the spots of the PBS sponsors. The banjo and fiddle of the BNSF Railway anthem tell me it’s almost time for Downton Abbey. But before I go sit with my mother, I slip into her bathroom, close the door, and look in the mirror. I conjure my small self, tow-headed and tan, looking back at me with newly green eyes that hold a world of longing to be loved. Your green eyes is my truth, my treasure, the amulet I still reach for when I need to know there was a time when my father looked at me and delighted in what he saw.
Image by Jan Krnc on pexels.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- Eye, Me, Mine - April 15, 2025
Gorgeously written! Impossible not to dive deep alongside this mesmerizing meander.
Loved this.