Cursed with perfect memory

My son, Mattias, started second grade last week. He wears a uniform of khakis and polo shirts to school, and on Wednesdays, he wears a button-up shirt and tie. He looks like a little Alex P. Keaton, the aspiring young Republican from Family Ties.

This morning he was stirring his Rice Krispies with his index finger like he always does when he looked up at me with that I’m-about-to-freak-you-out-with-some-heavy-shit look. He gives me those a lot.

“Today is my seventh day of class in second grade,” he said. “That means only three more days.”

“Till what buddy?”

“Until the fire drill,” he mumbled. Mattias lives with remarkably sensitive hearing, which is great when he plays his ukulele with me at gigs. Not so good when it comes to fire alarms. He also tends to be pretty obsessive, so things that bother him consume an inordinate amount of his energy.

He’s already told us that he’s picking his college based on whether or not they have fire drills.

“So they tell you when you are going to have fire drills?” I said. “Kind of seems to defeat the purpose of the drill.”

“They don’t,” he said, sucking the milk off of his finger. “But in kindergarten, we had a fire drill on the tenth day of school.”

“You remember that?”

“Yeah,” he looked at me with the look that suggests no small amount of pity for me and my mediocre brain, “I was in Mr. Vigil’s music class, playing the turtle drum when it went off.”

“Wow.”

“The next one happened twenty-three school days later,” he said. “Luis and I were coloring in a puzzle. We had just finished the fifth piece and started on the sixth one when…” he held his hands up in the air to suggest the chaos that followed.

I envy my son’s memory sometimes. I can’t remember the name of the guy I met at church last Sunday. I forget appointments, even when they’re in my calendar. Once I forgot to take my driver’s license to the airport, which thrilled my wife, Amy. She calls me the absent-minded professor.

But clearly Mattias’ memory doesn’t always serve him in ways he’d like. I’m sure he’d be more than happy to forget about his kindergarten fire alarm traumas. But we don’t always get to choose what we remember and what we forget. As frustrated as I get about my porous memory, I can list of plenty of moments I can’t seem to erase.

Like the day my parents admitted me to a psychiatric hospital at the beginning of the summer of my junior year in high school.

Or the day my dad punched me in the stomach for mouthing off in the garage.

Or when I asked the girl at junior high homecoming to dance and he friend spit an ice cube in my face.

I’m a fan of Oliver Sacks, a neuropsychologist who writes books about the phenomena he encounters while treating patients with unique brain injuries and disorders. He writes of patients with anterograde amnesia, who perpetually suffer from a loss of short-term memory, as if they were hamsters on a wheel that never stops spinning. They just keep running, never getting anywhere.

There was one woman he wrote about who lost her memory entirely, as well as the capacity to cling to new ones. We talk sometimes about the value of living in the moment, but for this woman it’s all she has. Dr. Sacks describes her as someone whose soul has been carved out and discarded.

I’d like to think my souls is comprised of more than the sum total of my experiences or memory; more than a travelogue of where I’ve been and what I’ve done. But although I tend to think of it as something more, I’m not sure what it is without those memories either. Even if it is more than that, does it have a foothold as part of who I am without those memories?

I sent Mattias to school with the assurance that the administrators at school probably didn’t plan fire drills with quite the same formula he has come up with. But this just caused him more concern since he might not be able to predict when the next one would come.

Welcome to the rest of your life, I thought. I hope that he can draw as much joy from the good memories he has as he does distress from the less pleasant ones. And maybe I’m not as jealous of his gift of memory as I thought.

Christian Piatt is an author, editor, speaker, musician and spoken word artist. He is the creator and editor of BANNED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE BIBLE and BANNED QUESTIONS ABOUT JESUS. Christian has a memoir on faith, family and parenting being published in early 2012 called PREGMANCY: A Dad, a Little Dude and a Due Date. Visit www.christianpiatt.com, or find him on Twitter or Facebook.