Remembering our Memories

by Arnold De Villa
June 1, 2012
Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow is the great unknown. Today is all we truly have, the now that goes and flows from later to a while ago, the dripping constant of seconds that leaves faster than it comes. We remember, we recall, we reminisce. And we ponder, we reflect while we submerge ourselves into the bitter sweet moments of glorious nostalgia packed in victory and defeat. There are prints of the past we prefer to delete while there are those we choose to recycle. With them, we smile or shed some tears. There are moments when we wallow in our solitude and there are times when we choose to have company.
“Memorial Day” is popularly considered as the unofficial commencement of summer. The weekend is when parades are lined up to honor those who died defending or fighting for the promotion or preservation of American foreign policy. It is when survivors and family members of the departed military commemorate the absence or death of a loved one. Regardless of political beliefs, convictions or patriotic sentiments, blood is blood and friendship is friendship. The cause of death is secondary to the relationship that is lost.
Americans are exemplary when it comes to the commemoration and celebration of the past. They are not alone. For history to persist and for our story to prevail, remembering the past is the only way to provide the present with a link to its cause. Remembering will not restore events of yesteryears. Reminiscing cannot revive the dead. Reviving the past cannot provide an actual solution to the present. Yet in every school program, in every library, through every legends, myths, tales and traditions we consistently hear, the past is treated and presented like a living fossil, steadfastly claiming its seat in our current times. Memories are the only bridges to preserve the holistic continuity of our species. Collective amnesia could be the ultimate disaster.
It is perhaps because of this that the experience of Alzheimer’s disease could be more tragic than a terminal cancer. Living a chronological limitation, witnessing the gradual decadence of our physiological integrity, and losing the ability of our senses to do what they used to are more than enough pain for those whose age draws closer to a century. When the mind falters and fails to recover the markers of a past identity, the current analysis of who we are will vacillate in bitter pangs of emptiness and hopelessness. It is such a torment to start living in the present when the present condition screams all the evidence that we did not merely start today.
For this reason, I would extend the celebration of “Memorial Day” as a time to recall all the significant memories that provide us with a thorough understanding of who we are, how we came to be, and where we are headed to. As you gather around the table with families or friends, try to come up with questions that could stimulate a healthy discussion of the past. Considering that most of us are immigrants, we all have those funny tales when we were new in these shores. I am sure we have a deep dossier of anecdotes that describe the difficulties we passed through, the loneliness we felt, the tough days of our first winter storm, the times when we did not have a car and traveled through the distant roads of the suburbs.
I still recall walking through icy pavements as we descended from a cab to do our grocery. Since we lived in a remote apartment without regular public transportation, food in the refrigerator and provisions in the pantry were only replenished once a week. Taxi fares were not that cheap to do regular shopping. We tended to overbuy and overstock without making any lists until we realized that the green leafy vegetables are starting to have roots and frozen food are being frozen burnt. We cooked for an army although it was just my wife, a friend who shared a room with us and me who gathered around the dinner table. Talking about the dinner table, I assembled that with a knife since we did not even have a screw driver when we started. Our television stand was an empty cardboard box and the very first couch we had was a discarded piece of furniture we found by the alley.
Our new beginning was not a life of poverty. It was merely moments of sheer ignorance. They make me laugh and they make me ask the basic questions on how we survived. More than anything else, they provide us with a collective identity and a legacy for my son that he could share to his children and to his children’s children. They took place more than twenty years ago, the memories of which are still as fresh as my son’s preserved umbilical cord. And they provide us with continuity and a sense of purpose to remain where we are and to move on with life.
When we actively remember our memories, we preserve our youth. Age is faster than the wink of an eye. Although it is a cliché, it is an undeniable truth that is like the law of gravity. We can never grow young. We can only grow old. When we were young, the perception of being old was just an imagination. Now that many of us are relatively old, the reality of our youth is an indelible experience. It is an imprint of history that cannot be deleted. One day, unfortunately, we might not be able to retrieve it. But before that happens, we can fight for our youth, recall those days, and transmit them before they vanish in our chronological disability to reminisce.
If you can, and I hope you can, identify the writer in your family and store the legacy of your name. The written format is not the only way these days. Picture albums, verbal recordings, event journals and scrap memorabilia are just one of the many ways that we can remember our memories. Worse comes to worst, rent a writer. Hire anyone of us. We will be more than happy to have a secondary employment if it could mean doing something noble for the next generation and leaving something worthy that could plant seeds for positive change.
For those who are self-doers, if you can, collect your journals, dig through your archives and start compiling everything that is still alive before they fade and vanish forever. It is not a question of dates, names or places. Those are important. But what is more valuable is the experience that surrounds those facts, embellished by the sentiments of how you felt them, and the wisdom learned from those sentiments. To begin with, if there is anything you would want your child or grandchild to know, what could that be? Write it down. Accentuate it with a picture or a detailed description of a place or a date. Do you have any secrets that you would only dare to disclose after the termination of your earthly life? Go ahead. Write them down, but be sure to lock them up lest you create a mess you don’t want to.
Back in the Philippines, we do not celebrate Memorial Day. This does not mean that our culture does not have the collective ability to do the same thing. We do. Despite the fact that our history lacks certain cohesion and our national identity still hankers for stronger binders that could help our nation grow as a people. We could all start as individuals realizing that there are so many memories worth remembering. Enjoy the summer! Thank you for reading!