Lately, I’ve been having to spend more time on family issues. Mostly surrounding my father, who is sadly afflicted with some sort of issues causing problems with some of his cognitive functions.
We’ve been to doctors, but have no firm diagnosis of what is going on with him other than “we know he has some issues. We just don’t know what they are.”
Since the beginning of the year, he’s been through some tribulations that have ended with another wrecked vehicle (you remember I wrote about his run-in with the train in the past,) and busted the screen on his laptop.
The latter sent me down a rabbit hole of old technology and finding a way to reclaim his digital past. Whether it will be useful or not is yet to be seen.
During the course of replacing his laptop over the past few weeks, I’ve taken trips up and down Sand Mountain in Alabama, and had time to think about the topic of memory a bit more than I have in the past.
Especially since these days, what we remember and what we believe might be two different subjects entirely.
Memory comes in many forms, but one thing is for certain that matter the most: the more people who remember you, the greater amount of social influence you have on the world in this particular point in history. You can be remembered fondly by historians and implanted into others’ memories through television documentaries in a positive way, or you can end up being like Stalin, Hitler, Judas, or Charles Manson (as some examples but not all, obviously.)
Legends and figures are made because of collective memory carrying them forward, not because of who they might have been individually in any given moment in their lives. Perception of who you are during your life and who you are when you are gone matters.
People know these names like the back of their hand, drilled so thoroughly into our collective memory as good and bad individuals that they MUST BE remembered for what they did and who they were as positive or negative examples to follow in the future.
Individually, we are lucky if we are remembered at all for who we are in the moments we have on this big green and blue spinning ball, always changing but over a span we can little comprehend or begin to control.
This has changed somewhat over the past few decades as digital memory is beginning to supplant what we would have been forced to hold in our heads for all time. After all, when the internet’s variety of technologies are combined together to hold all this information – it surpasses in many instances what would ever be possible in an individual mind.
Families are no different these days when it comes to saving all these digital moments we’ve created over time.
Photos are a good for instance. In the process of getting his new computer setup, he first handed over a laptop that he bought sometime in the mid 2000s, and had a decent collection of photos he’d after purchase or old ones of the whole family (pre-divorce) scanned to be digitally saved.
(Brief sidebar for the record: Either something spilled horribly on that laptop, or the “rubberized surface” that Dell used back in the day on the screen side went real bad… the thing still booted up enough for me to ensure the hard drive worked.)
When I took new computer up here a couple of days ago to him, I ensured those photos were available for him to look at whenever he wanted to do so.
Then son-of-a-gun, he hands me another laptop. This one with a whole other set of photos on it, some of the same music probably. But either way, would have been lost if I didn’t know what I was doing with it.
Some memories probably are going to be lost forever since it is impossible to save them in a world where the focus is more digital than physical than ever.
When, for instance, was the last time you even loaded film into a camera? (I can tell you when it was for me – 2002, before I got my own digital camera off of eBay.)
I’m glad that I was able to get his lost photos. It’s a glimpse not just into his past, but my own as well…
Dad has been going on about these slides and a projector that has been lugged around from one family member to the next over the past decades. I had it sitting around and for a while completely forgot its existence, but Dad hadn’t.
Somehow the dang thing still works, and the slides are all still (as far as I can tell) in a condition to be viewed through the projector built and probably used last in the 1960s.
I understand his nostalgia kick in the moment, since he’s attempting to hold onto memories from the distant past that he can still control and pass onto the next generations. This is the side of genealogy that isn’t on family trees – the stories that defined who a person was, sparked by photographs that someone now long gone took to capture a moment in time they found important. Birthday parties and weddings, graduations and holiday dinners. The sacred photographs that can be lost in an instant but hold thousands of words within an image that brings back a flood to the senses and provides a brief escape into “remember when.”
Nothing now is what it used to be, and we can blame it on a lot of things – cultural and generational divides, overabundance of technology in our lives driving us toward social media instead of physical presence, etc.
Change takes us in strange directions, where the concept of even spending time with family is as much about the photos posted on Instagram to share with everyone than it is about the actual time spent together.
Not that I’ve been any kind of reliable source of expertise on this subject since admittedly, I’m bad about making time outside of my work life for anything else. The news is a cruel mistress that will take over my time and attention at a moment’s notice with all kinds of nonsense. Yet it is my livelihood, so how can I ignore a shooting incident while I’m supposed to be eating dinner with Jess, or peel myself away for appointments when Cedartown and Rockmart are playing football against one another?
Expectations from the audience intrude upon who I try to be as a human – always have, and always will. It doesn’t mean I don’t try hard on both ends, but I am not Superman. There’s only so much I can do in a day during the time I drag myself out of bed until I finally force myself to lay down again.
Family time is important, of course. I’ve spent a lot of my hours chasing down what others are doing with their families as news instead of spending the quality time with my own folks. I’m sure the various members of my clan will attest to the lack of timeliness and concentration during everything from birthday parties to vacations.
I am who I am, I can’t help it. I make no excuses for it.
So what will people remember of me, then? An absent son, brother, uncle and friend? Not entirely reliable because of the amount of chasing I do down rabbit holes? I wouldn’t blame them if they did. I definitely won’t be remembered for being “good” in the typical way. Helpful at times, noncommittal at others; just a guy who sometimes made a splash with a good headline would be ok if I am lucky when there’s nothing left but memories of me.
That’s the trouble with memory, isn’t it? The whole concept of remembering when or harkening back is always fraught with the rose-tinted glasses worn during such nostalgic moments. Already a dangerous emotion, nostalgia has a tendency to warp our memories collectively about the past – especially moments of tragedy where we seek to find meaning and others to blame for both individual and collective disaster.
It doesn’t help that everyone wants to present the world with how they want to be perceived, but their opinions will greatly differ from what one will see in the reflection in the mirror versus the selfie screen – especially with all the filters being used these days.
The added absurdity of the artificial lives we present online to the world – as if everything in everyone’s family on Facebook is excellent every moment of every day – doesn’t help determine what we should be remembering in the first place.
After all, if all we can remember about a vacation stems from the photos shared on social media making it picturesque and positive in the first place, then what is actually recalled later?
Whether it be good times or bad, there’s a difference between memory and truth, the same goes with fiction and fact. Hence why I like to record interviews and meetings. You can’t hide behind audio and video – or at least you couldn’t until AI programmers came up with audio and video editing that can just make up anything it wants.
Now memory is completely tainted forever, we can never actually know what is true or false because now you have the issue of can you trust that you even saw what you did in the past, or did an AI just “fix your photo for you” or “update your video.”
So the question I’m asking myself these days is “can you secure a digital past?” and if so, what will it look like to do so? Right now it is a collection of files, but in the future? Will it be something more, a supplemental to what happened? Will I be able to live other memories? Will I want to?
Joy and fear, pleasure and pain all have a price tag, after all. So too will our memories if things continue the way they have been in the long view of time.
For now, I’ll just keep the backup and refer to it when necessary. Too much nostalgia can be a bad thing.
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