Memories persist, encoded and tucked away in our brain awaiting recall, while others insist on popping up at odd times. Still other memories, like the name of someone we know, insist on hiding in shadows just beyond recall. Lethologica, that pesky tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, is common amongst people worldwide, more common as we age or tire, but not necessarily indicative of a cognitive issue. I call it “what’s-his-name” syndrome.
A remarkable thing is why we remember anything at all. Our species, like most other vertebrate animals, is hard-wired to remember, a protective device to keep us out of trouble. Don’t touch the hot stove, we are cautioned. We do it anyway and never forget the lesson learned. We remember peoples’ names and faces, pleasant events and past traumas, including things we wish we could forget. But along with important matters, some people also accumulate trivia. I am one of them.
By common definition, remembered trivia, bits of information or matters of little importance, may be getting a bad rap. Maybe we just don’t recognize the true importance of trivia.
I am the youngest of four siblings born over a decade from 1931 to 1941. My parents were in their forties when I came along. As a child, I heard their stories, memories from the early decades of the twentieth century, the 1910s and 1920s, and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Their memories became over time my memories. Sure, I remember the important facts they imparted to me, birthdays, life-changing events. But I also remember the little things, seemingly trivial at the time.
Such matters interest me as a writer of historical fiction; personal memories and learned memories from others play a big part in fictional world-building. Maybe memories and a penchant for trivia account for my lifelong interest in history. The causes and effects of historical changes that shape our world include an accumulation of small, seemingly trivial events.
My mother rode in carriages as a young girl and on Sundays wore white starched pinafores with knee-length white stockings. On sunny days she carried a lace parasol. She, her parents, and siblings one Sunday at a Fresno, California park in 1907, heard John Phillip Sousa play stirring marches celebrating America’s victory in the Spanish-American War less than a decade earlier.
In 1909, my father, barefoot and in knee-length britches, sold newspapers on a street corner in St. Joseph, Missouri. His grandfather, who later became a deputy sheriff, relayed to my father how outlaw Jesse James and his gang, on the run in 1879, once shot chickens in my great-grandfather’s yard and paid them in cash.
My two grandmothers, both vivid storytellers enthralled me with events from their past. My great-grandmother in her nineties told of Confederate raiders who ransacked her home in the closing days of the Civil War when she was ten years old. I heard from her what it was like to fill coal-oil lamps, spin yarn, and ride stagecoaches and trains west to California in the 1880s.
Some of us remember events from an early age, even from infancy. At birth we all hit the ground running, so to speak, gifted with our parents’ and ancestors’ DNA. If we are fortunate enough, as I was, to know and experience parents and grandparents during our formative years we can absorb their accumulated memories. We can learn family stories handed down over multiple generations.
The past is part of us, perhaps in ways we don’t fully understand until a point in life when our accumulated past forms a picture of ourselves, a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces fit in place. The popularity of historical fiction in literature ebbs and flows over time, but never disappears. Could it be because in historical fiction we find traces of ourselves, pieces that will help complete our personal puzzle?
Speaking of historical fiction, I will soon release The Unfrozen Sea, my historical novel, on Substack in serialized form, free to subscribers. More about that soon.
Thanks for reading.