Memories—Guarded Citadels of Self-Identity

It’s taken me eight decades to finally absorb a basic truth: pain creates its own memories. Apart from logic, immune from rationality, invulnerable to entreaty, our hearts record as factual all the nuances of our experienced pain. For me, the wounds of childhood are especially etched in stony remembrance. But who is to say how accurate my recall? How correctly chronicled the injustices? How true my inner narrative?

Coincidentally, I’m currently reading a book club selection, Home Turf by Lakin Khan, a local octogenarian, writer, and speaker. In the opening pages, Khan explores the verbal descriptions of animals recorded in beastiaries –illustrated volumes or catalogues which have been around for nearly two millennia. The animals depicted in these ancient works were mostly unseen by others, their descriptions imparted through generations, “third or fourth or fifth hand.” These interpretations were “crude sketches passed on from traveler to traveler to teller, gaining and losing detail, suffering modification and distortion, being expanded and exaggerated . . .” Khan concludes, however, in the “sharing of facts, the accounts did contain many nuggets of truth.”

Similarly, pain memories contain many nuggets of truth. Indubitably, they are also unconsciously and unintentionally distorted, expanded and exaggerated. Because they are ours, we hold them as intrenched facts, accurate beyond expulsion, guarded citadels of self-identity. Eight decades later, my childhood memories are frozen in time, indisputably self-rehearsed. What really matters now are my emotional responses to life each sunrise moment as I seek to moderate impulses triggered by crude sketches drafted by my long-ago pain.

Right on cue, my family gifted me with a trip to Seattle in commemoration of my 80th birthday. We took flight December 30th to celebrate the New Year in my birth-city, the nine of us hobbled together by DNA and matrimony. I arrived wearing my t-shirt ticket given to me earlier as a clue to said trip. During our four-day stay we went up in the Space Needle, saw a Chihuly Glass exhibit, rode the monorail to downtown for a visit to Pike Street Market, took a roundtrip ferry ride to Bainbridge Island with Mt. Rainier a visible backdrop, rode the Big Wheel waterfront Ferris wheel at night, and took a side trip to Snoqualmie Falls. A big moment was viewing the fireworks celebration at the Space Needle from a balcony at my son’s rented condo.

Best of all, and the main reason for our trip together, we visited places rich with my childhood and growing-up memories. The apartment building my father owned (where I lived for the first four years of my life). The two-story house on a tree-lined street, with its twin gables hugging a small front balcony (where I lived until I was seventeen). Three houses away, lush Volunteer Park with its historic indoor botanical garden Conservatory (where I escaped to as a teenager, learning to love nature though ensconced in a wire-strewn city paved in cement), and its 1933 Art Deco building Art Museum with two stone camel guardians in front (which I loved to climb on to look out to the not-so-far-away waters of Puget Sound), and its more-than-75-foot red brick Water Tower built in 1906, with 107 interior steps spiraling upwards inside its perimeter to a lookout on top (where I could see beyond my capture to distant snowcapped mountains and other faraway possibilities). One of my grandsons counted the steps. I had thought there were 197 steps, again confirming my sometimes-faulty memory.

We drove by my grade school, three blocks away from my house next to Volunteer Park. The large three-story wooden structure I remember is gone, replaced by a sprawling one-story building. The area in front where I played as a child, and where in the spring a May pole was erected and hung with long crepe paper streamers, is now a drop-off area for cars.

My daughter took photos of her boys with me in front of Garfield High, its iconic multi-tiered stairs front entrance now hugged by The Quincy Jones Performing Arts Center. I remember climbing those vast stairs on my first day, awed and frightened at the same time. It seemed so BIG then; it looks smaller and more condensed now.

Opened in 1938, Ivar’s Acres of Clams still hugs the waterfront, though two of its fluorescent letters were out when I saw it this time. Somehow, I related. My mother, father, brother, and I used to park across the street under the Alaskan Way Viaduct, now torn down, replaced by a 6-lane surface road. Not seeing the Viaduct was somewhat disorienting to me.

Smith Tower, located in the heart of downtown Pioneer Square, became Seattle’s first skyscraper in 1914 and the tallest building west of the Mississippi River until 1931. It remained the tallest building on the U.S. West Coast until the Space Needle overtook it in 1962, the year I graduated from high school. It’s now dwarfed by skyscrapers, the tallest being the 76-story Columbia Center completed in 1985, which rises 937 feet. My memory of Smith Tower towering over my birth-city is almost obliterated, insignificant in a skyline of seemingly endless glass and steel.

Going down memory lane in Seattle with my family was a cherished time for me, one that will provide hours of happy recall in the days and years to come. Nevertheless, of one thing I am certain. Each member of the family will remember it differently, each bringing to their experience all the nuances of their emotions, tactile encounters, visual intakes, meals eaten, sounds heard, thoughts pondered. Later, as together we recall our trip, what only matters are our responses to each other and to life each sunrise moment.