A few years ago, I can’t remember exactly when, I was trying to recall the name of the newspaper in Montreal that I wrote a few freelance pieces for, the main English daily. I searched for the name in the recesses of my memory, not so much a wracking of my brain as scouring for a detail I was certain I knew, and just needed to be coaxed out with a quiet sit-down.
But I couldn’t come up with it. When I was a journalism student, looking at postings for summer jobs, I once knew the names of all the big-city papers in Canada. But the Gazette was misplaced somewhere in a back corner, pushed out by the expanding corners of my known world by things like the monetary policy of the Ghanaian central bank, how cocoa farmers deal with fungus, how it feels to sink into a sand dune in Niger.
In recent weeks I have been informed of things I had soundly forgotten, like the time my parents visited me in Toronto, and we went to my favourite local diner and saw a comedian there. I remember the diner, but not the comedian. So whose memory do I question, my own, or that of the other two people who were there?
This is a central problem for memoir writers, and one of my main areas of resistance. But when I’m reminded of what I’ve forgotten, there’s evidence. I suspect I don’t recall the scene in the Toronto diner because it was a simple, pleasant meal with my parents. Same with the Gazette: I submitted my stories, they were published and I was paid. A relatively hassle-free process.
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When I’m writing, I write to where the energy is, in scenes and moments that tell me something bigger about myself. Memory – what I remember and why – has come up a lot lately. My grandfather, who at lunch a few weeks ago took a few minutes to remember what the mourning dove at the feeder was called, recently wrote down the name of the ships he sailed on as a Merchant Marine and the places he visited around the world, decades earlier. I looked at photographs of him and search his face for the man I hugged for the last time not two weeks ago, the man who a week from now would have celebrated his 92nd birthday but who instead today goes home, as my Ghanaian friends might say.
And this is why I got nervous when I forget the name of the Gazette. If I write to where there is energy, for a long time my energy was directed away from my home country, from what I knew of Canada – of the crunch of snow on the sidewalks of Toronto, the summer sun on a lake. If I forgot the nouns of Canada, the newspapers and the sidewalks and lakes, I worried I will forget the people in it. Will I forget, because the world is so big and so many details are swallowed, that when I took my grandfather lunch not long ago he laughed at my aqua blue fingernails?
No. I’ll remember that, that moment. I’ve converted it to energy to store as a memory, to be rooted away and recalled when I need it to be, even though it might do something like push out the name of an old coworker in Johannesburg, a restaurant in London. But to keep that, the big world becomes small again, the details narrow, and there’s no fault in my memory.