I read an Iris Murdoch novel recently where the retired protagonist was described as existing in the ‘relaxed banality of a life without goals’. I was definitely feeling like that after my retirement, so I started to pick up various challenges presented by social media. Some weeks ago there was ‘Inktober’, where you draw something in ink every day, according to various prompts, for the month of October and then post it. That was fun and somewhat challenging, but, guess what, October ended as it always does, on October 31. So, after that what I found to do was the #15weekportrait challenge hosted on Instagram by artist @ajalper. It’s just like it sounds – you paint a portrait a week for 15 weeks, posting it on Instagram with appropriate hashtags, and hopefully you improve your skills as you go along. That has brought me to week seven, almost the halfway mark, and a portrait of my Mom that I thought I wouldn’t let go by without a blog post.
I had painted my Mom several times, but never my ‘young’ Mom, the way she looked when I first met her back in the 1950’s. So, painting her this way was a little like looking at her through my baby eyes many, many years after the fact! She was quite an influence and taught us to be honest (see my brother’s post on how honest he is), industrious (that’s why I like having goals, I guess) and creative. We lost her five years ago now and she is the first person, that, when she died, I had the distinct feeling that she wasn’t dead at all. I could see her face in every flower and still feel her in the elements, and certainly she has gone on living in her descendants.
7 weeks of Portrait challenge subjects from the upper corner down and across: My friend’s granddaughter, my niece, granddaughter #2, granddaughter #5, granddaughter #4, the hub, and Mom.
Even with so many channels to choose from, Kathleen and I were getting tired of the same old thing on TV. We’d had enough of the Hallmark Christmas channel, British-Village-Quaint-Murder station, the Forensic-Crime-Scene-Investigation network, and the all-Star-Trek channel. We needed something new, so we cranked the selector wa‑a‑a‑ay up into the second thousands, to find some channels with new themes.
We came across our new favorite: the Hallmark Russian Literature Christmas Romance Channel!
Here’s today’s lineup.
The Christmas Express (9 hours)
Kelly doesn’t believe in Christmas, because she is an atheist. When a blizzard shuts down the Nizhni Novgorod train station on Christmas Eve, she is forced to share a room with Bradimir, a young divinity student who was so traumatized by his drunken abusive father that his is unable to open up about his emotions.
Kelly and Brad spend the entire night, and all the next day, arguing and debating about religion, destiny, and human and divine love. By the time the storm clears on Christmas night, Kelly believes in Christmas, and Brad believes in Feelings. They declare their undying love for each other and kiss under the mistletoe in the train station, before boarding trains heading East and West, never to see each other again.
A Cookie Cutter Christmas (7 hours)
Megan runs a little bakery that used to be her working-class father’s, until he was killed in the Napoleonic Wars. Times are hard and food is scarce, so she enters the Tzar’s baking contest. The winner of the best gingerbread Faberge Egg will become the Tzar’s Imperial Pastry Chef.
She takes an instant dislike to another contestant, Lieutenant Gregory Pfeffernov, the scion of an aristocratic baking dynasty. She sees him as autocratic, conceited, and French-speaking, while he sees her as uppity, pushy, and common. Each must admit that the other is an excellent chef, though. By the end of the contest, the two put aside their class differences and start to plan a life together, as they listen to, off in the distance–are those Christmas fireworks? No, they’re the guns of the Decembrist revolutionaries!
Crime and Punishment and Christmas PART ONE (9 hours)
Anna has just been fired, and is trying to decide the best way to commit suicide when she is accidentally offered the job of nursemaid to young Pavel, who lost his legs in a playground duel. She has no medical training, but every time she tries to explain this to Pavel’s brooding tormented widowed father Boris, circumstances, or her own reluctance to be cast into the street, seem to interfere.
Her warm heart and skill with a wheelchair soon endear her to Pavel and Boris. She begins to think that there may be a future with this god-forsaken family, but then the servants catch her dancing the Mazurka with Boris even though they are not betrothed, and she is forced to flee in shame. Boris spends the next four years searching until he finds her in a convent. He confesses his love, and though he is now penniless from gambling debts, they marry and are briefly blissfully happy until he dies.
So if your provider doesn’t already carry it, tell him that you want the Hallmark Russian Literature Christmas Romance Channel! And if he won’t add it, then despair at the mindless cruelty of the universe!
alking with Kathleen while driving home from a visit with family and friends this weekend, we thought of a perfect Thanksgiving blog post. It was humorous and insightful, based on past and present experiences with said family and friends, and it was both personal and universal. As I drove and we talked, I wished I had a way to write the post right then—I didn’t trust my memory to retain all the interesting facets of the topic we were exploring.
Sure enough, by the time we arrived at home, I had forgotten that I wanted to write this great idea down immediately. And by next morning, we had this conversation:
“Remember that great blog idea we talked about?” ”Yeah, that was great. What was it?” “I have no idea. You?” ”Uh, no.”
So instead of that post, I’ll write one about memory.
My memory has always given me trouble. There were some things like numbers and certain classes of facts that I have no trouble retaining. For example, I can remember almost every phone number I ever dialed. But for the most important stuff—the things involving people—my memory is really spotty at best. I have trouble remembering names and birthdates I should know, shared experiences, and the intricacies of evolving personal lives and interactions of my friends, family and acquaintances.
This manifests itself in all sorts of little inconveniences. I have to write down lists of things I want to do, or include in a letter, or shop for, and I have yet to figure out how to remember to read the list when I need it. The best I can do is to have lots of lists lying around (Kathleen hates that), in the hopes that I will be continually reminded of their existence.
And there are a few perks–I think it’s easier for me to forget a past injustice, argument or insufferable encounter. And I suspect (though I have no way of knowing first-hand) that I sometimes find myself surprised and delighted by a new discovery multiple times, provided I wait long enough between revelations for the previous memory to fade.
In balance, it’s a shame, though. My people memories are the things that I love best, but I even have trouble keeping track of things as simple as which grandchild has which birthday. (This is mostly my daughters’ fault, because my grandsons’ birthdays are within a week of each other (different years of course), and so are my granddaughters’.)
I’m pretty sure this is a real deficit, and not just me not settling for a normal, functional but imperfect memory. My friends and fam seem to be able to pull up memories of the past without even trying, while I feel like I really have to work at it. It’s not debilitating, but it does make me feel a twinge of loss, similar to how I feel when my mild deafness prevents me from fully engaging in a conversation.
As an adaptation over the years, I developed a healthy appetite for being engaged in the present moment. I suspect I am no more successful at “being here now” than other people, but at least I try to be conscious most of the time of this goal to be present. This goal coincides with New Age and popular Buddhist philosophies, but I am just trying to get the most from each experience in the present because I don’t know how well I’ll be able to access it again once it’s in the past.
Now that I’ve entered my Third Age, I have to wonder if I should have worked harder at developing my ability to make and keep the kind of memories I wanted. Has my so-called “adaptation” just been a cop-out? Will a time come when I really need to draw on those memories, but I won’t have access to enough of them?
The retirement classes I took always stressed the importance of depositing money into your IRA account regularly starting at the very beginning of your professional life, to assure that by the end of it there will be enough to support you. Is there a similar rule for one’s bank of memories, that I blew off? By adapting rather than trying to improve my memory skills, have I fallen behind in making my deposits to my mental IRA? Will I be able to withdraw enough memories as needed to meet my psychic needs?
There’s no answer to this of course, and I that’s probably not even a very apt analogy. Experiences and memories aren’t like money, you can enjoy them both now and later. The best I can do is to cherish all my experiences, and all my memories, as if they are rare treasures. Which of course they are, no matter how perfect one’s memory is. Happy Thanksgiving.
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I’ve been musing on memory lately because I just read a novel that had memory, and the loss of it, at its core: The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa. It was a 2019 National Book Award finalist, described on Goodreads as a “hypnotic, gentle novel that begins as a surveillance-state dystopia, and ends as something more existential: a surreal and haunting meditation on our sense of self.”
The book is all that, and I enjoyed reading it, but I can’t recommend it without a caution. You know how when you’re reading Japanese fantastical fiction or watching a Japanese movie, even while part of you is enjoying the show, another part is hoping the story doesn’t get all melancholy and creepy by the end, like Japanese fiction sometimes does? Well, this is one of those stories that gets that way. But it sure held my attention!
Here’s a book with a theme of remembering and forgetting that I can recommend whole-heartedly: The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro (the same Brit who wrote The Remains of the Day). It an easy and fairly short book (maybe 300 pages), and it reads like a dreamy adventure story from Dark Ages England. An old man and his wife decide to go on a trip to visit their son whom they are having trouble remembering, and have all sorts of natural and supernatural experiences on the way. Reading it was an unmitigated pleasure, like listening to the retelling of a thousand-year old myth. Get this one from the library and enjoy it!!
And since I seem now to be writing about loss-of-memory fantasy stories, let me mention two movies I’ve enjoyed over the years. If you missed these, you should catch them on Netflix.
The first is Memento (2000), a noir thriller about a man trying to hunt down the man who murdered his wife in an attack that also left him unable to hold onto any new memories for more than a few minutes. It’s fascinating to see how he even manages to survive, much less conduct a murder investigation, and to see how the people around him enable or exploit him for their own ends. The movie plays out in anti-chronological order, so the audience experiences something of the same continual disorientation that the hero is going through.
The other is The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), which was also excellent even though it starred Jim Carrey. It’s a love story of what can go right and wrong when technology is invented that allows surgical removal of unhappy romantic memories, and how hard someone can fight for memories they value.
I like stories of people trying to remember, or sometimes trying to forget, perhaps because of my own challenges. Do you have a favorite remembering or forgetting story, your own or someone else’s? I’d love to hear it.
