In my mind’s eye I can still see her standing over the sink in the corner of the tiny apartment kitchen, plucking feathers from the goose I shot earlier that day. My first Canada goose. A vivid memory of my grandmother I’m thankful I can still recall, a memory I can touch anytime.
And then there’s the old color photograph taken with a Kodak Instamatic camera. A picture of a scrawny kid posing with a goose behind an apartment complex, wearing green military fatigues given to me by a neighbor and altered by my grandmother to fit; I didn’t own actual hunting clothes. A camouflage hunting cap atop my head, purchased in the sporting goods department of a nearby Montgomery Ward store. And on occasion when I hold my old Stevens 16-gauge in my arms, I can unlock the larger story. A goose tag. A man we called Schmitty. A rented hunting blind on a hillside. The shot and retrieve. A wild goose dinner.
Memories are powerful. Triggered by any number of cues – smells, taste, sounds, temperature, light, music, stories, old photos. Some are faded or rightfully buried. And some are just lost as the passing of time erases and deletes. People don’t smoke pipes anymore, and I’m certain a few memories of my father’s father have drifted away consequently. Leather boots and mink oil are not as prevalent, and so my memories of youthful pheasant hunts in southern Wisconsin seem fainter.
I’ve always tried to understand and explore the triggers and cues that activate these Proustian moments. And when the right cue appears and the contents of the old shoe box in my mind are spilled onto the floor, I encourage the flow of spontaneous emotion unleashed. Happiness, gratitude, sorrow, sadness, whatever comes, and whether a smile or laugh, an ache in my heart, or maybe a tear, I embrace the moment. Flashes to be treated with kid gloves. More valuable than any possession because they can belong to only me and are the very essence of what it means to be human.
And attached to each are lessons learned, stories to be told, and a shared history. A legacy of time. And with a magnifying glass I peer deeper into eyes and the background of the moment, searching for context, imagining what is known and unknown, and wondering how it all came together.
Once, while rummaging through old photos, my mother found a picture of her father, my grandfather. He died too soon and my memory of him is almost non-existent. I heard the stories of his love for hunting and fishing, visited his cabin, fished from his wooden rowboat, but more definitive proof was sparse. The picture she passed on to me was a voice from the grave. Standing next to the cabin, fish displayed atop the wood pile, I saw a fisherman, a sportsman in his element. And when I opened the envelope my mother sent along with the photo, I was stunned. Inside were two old federal duck stamps from 1935 and 1936, his signature across the front; he was a waterfowl hunter. In these artifacts I found the sinew connecting myth to story and story to truth. And in the fog of this truth stands his grandson who by coincidence or fate would become a fisherman, waterfowl hunter, and a conservationist.
Unfortunately, my people didn’t do a good job of keeping the old photos, and I, too, likely pitched some pictures and other odds and ends while searching through the remains of family belongings after their passing. A terrible mistake because I didn’t know their meaning or the story within. And with the passing of each day, the memories and stories drift further away, eventually becoming spiritual antiquities forever lost with the passing of each person they touched.
In his wildly imaginative book, SUM: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, David Eagleman, tells us, “There are three deaths: the first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”
But what good is immortality without a memory and a few good stories? We cannot see into the future. And when we are young, the past is disposable; we live only in the moment. But memories, carefully curated, can linger and enrich our lives until the time comes when they vanish or their fossilized remains are left to interpretation by some budding family genealogist.
And so when they ask me, if you could have a conversation with any person from the past, who would it be? I can tell you it won’t be Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, or Socrates.
Grandpa, I’ve got some questions. Did you really try catching muskies with live red squirrels?
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