The Blue Honda Civic

Reflections on Memory - First in a Planned Series We'll See if I Remember to Get Back To

About 23 years ago I gave my sister $600 cash in exchange for the keys to a blue Honda Civic she hadn’t owned for very long. I was 21, she 25. She’d never really taken to driving. I remember an early lesson, mom I think in the passenger’s seat and me in the back, when Sarah turned the wrong way on a not empty one-way street and everyone panicked and there was swerving and braking and lurching and exclamations and she pulled off into a lucky parking lot and in the aftermath of the emergency we sat stunned and breathing. I remember once making an ill-timed decision to turn as a novice driver with her in the passenger’s seat, the way she gasped as I lefted out just ahead of the oncoming car, and I remember lying preposterously that I’d seen its brake lights illuminate—as if cars had those in the front. 

She’d picked me up from the airport in the Civic one time and played me the Shirley Bassey version of “Light My Fire” on the way home and sung along with gusto. 

When I came back to Austin finally to enroll in college after having achieved and scuttled a long-term goal of working in minor league baseball, she was happy to be rid of the car. I remember we negotiated the price quickly and with no fuss and I got the cash mostly by selling a Saturn with a cracked cylinder head to a shop in Knoxville. 

I don’t know what she did with the money. Neither does she, probably, since in fact she has no memory of ever having owned a blue Honda Civic, or of selling me one, and denies emphatically that any of it ever happened.   

The Truth of Feeling

There’s a short story by Ted Chiang, “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”, anthologized in his 2019 collection Exhalation, in which a journalist in the not so distant future considers the relational and sociological impact likely to result from a new technology that confers eidetic memory to its users. Not an adopter himself, the journalist researches his story by sampling from the warehouses of photographically recalled memories maintained by people he knows, including his grown daughter. The pivotal moment of he and his daughter’s relationship, the journalist avers, had come years prior when she’d laid the blame for the divorce that had foundered their household solely at his feet. The journalist had seized on this moment of fracture to forge a new relationship with his daughter and was proud of what he’d achieved. So (spoiler alert!) it comes as a shock when, in reviewing her own flawless recall of the scene in question, he’s treated to the truth of the matter: he had blamed the divorce on her, his daughter.

The Christmas Party 

One night back in the early teens someone brought a bottle of Absinthe to the French Broad Brewery’s staff holiday party. The party, by old custom, was held in the upstairs of a particular Italian restaurant in downtown Asheville. A limited menu had been curated for us. For some reason on this December night the only beer available to drink was our own Wee Heavy’er, a Scotch ale in the neighborhood of 7.5% ABV. At least that’s how I remember it. 

Then the Absinthe started going around. 

Some hours later I came to eating popcorn on the floor of my living room in the glow of an episode of Boardwalk Empire. How I’d gotten there I had no idea. It resurfaced in me (as if through a glass, and darkly) that I’d just been standing in the kitchen next to the microwave waiting for the popcorn to pop, that I’d poured it into this perfectly appropriate bowl, that I’d located this show I’d seen maybe three episodes of and tweaked the volume just so—Arielle being asleep in the adjoining bedroom. All of this floated up so peculiarly in my mind I could think of no better way of describing it than to say it was like realizing I hadn’t been dreaming. 

“You blacked in,” a friend told me. 

A Weighty Question 

There’s Alzheimer’s in my family. There’s also longevity sufficient to reveal various strains of garden variety dementia among the long in the tooth: the giveth and taketh-away of so-called “good” genes. It’s enough of a consideration that I’ve spent more time than is probably healthy ruminating on the likelihood that someday I’ll have forgotten everything. I am frankly a bit terrified by the prospect.    

When you drink too much and come unstrung from your own mind, you might be having a glorious time, you might hold court winningly, you might have a probing conversation or a singular idea or stumble on epic hilarity,¹ but in the morning it’s as if nothing happened at all, none of it, following some decisive tock of your brain’s second hand. From one instant to the next you went from a recording presence to a sieve of experience or a black hole: the light may have fallen into you, but it isn’t ever coming out. 

It will surprise no one I’ve known at all well over the course of this century that this is a condition I’ve had considerable dealings with. The paramount feeling I associate with the loss of a night is shame: I have wasted something precious. Being better acquainted with this sensation than I ought has led me frequently into dark regions of thought picturing a future that is macrocosmic to the tawdry tale of a frittered-away weekend: surfacing as an old timer into the lapsing twilight of an unremembered life. Will it have mattered that I had fun, that I did well, that I learned and loved and taught and was loved, if I don’t remember a thing?

Will I have existed, absent proof? 

It was The Presidio

It isn’t impossible to imagine a life without sight or hearing or smell, but memory? Touch? They’re connected, maybe, conceptually, at a ground level. Memory is the flesh of our inner lives, in endless tactile contact with the world, graffiti’d and tatted-up and bruised and Jackson Pollack’d, weathered in the deep, mulching terroir of our experience. 

I think of the word “palimpsest,” the ur-whiteboard, a piece of parchment when parchment was animal vellum, bovine flesh, that could be partially erased and written over. 

Let’s see, here’s my sister again. We were in a living room—one of hers, I think—with one of her boyfriends, maybe. Not that Dave, the other Dave, the carpenter, maybe, with the round glasses and German features? Anyway we were playing a game. The Kevin Bacon game. And I was trying to remember the name of a movie that had Mark Harmon and Sean Connery in it. “It starts with a ‘p’,” I said, “but not a ‘p’ word you hear very often.” 

“Palimpsest,” my sister said, brilliantly. 

A memory, deteriorating, of trying to remember: a disintegrating speech bubble still fadingly suggesting palimpsest. 

A memory is a contact print of experience, exhibits A thru Z for the defense. No wonder the fear of losing one is existential. 

A Poem I Allegedly Responded To Once For a Final Exam 

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
So many things seem filled with the intent 
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something everyday. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. 
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.  

Then practice losing farther, losing faster: 
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went. 
The art of losing isn’t hard to master. 

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, 
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. 

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident 
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it) like disaster. 

A Quibble with Whitman 

Memory is a work in progress: a self-pouring, self-editing foundation. I’m not exactly clear on what the difference is between my memory and myself, where one ends and the other begins, or if that’s even a thing. To mistrust my own memories, then, to acknowledge myself as an unreliable narrator, is to blur my shape in life, in the world, but this needn’t necessarily be traumatic. It might actually be kind of cool. To mistrust one’s own version could be to allow for a greater variety of selves. It’s not so much that we contain multitudes as we present them while reflexively paring our own self-image down to how we like it. It’s just easier to go through life that way. 

I know how to see myself in a mirror, for instance, in the most advantageous light. You have to be precisely me-sized to see me the way I want to be seen. I know when to suck in my gut at just the right moment, how to angle my jaw. (Hence the reliably crushing disappointment of the candid photograph.) You, you have no choice but to see me unposed, in actuality, lumpen and bewattled and in not the best fitting clothes. 

This must be why, for as much as we love to gossip, we can’t gossip about ourselves. You can no more accurately see yourself than you can fail to log the disjoint between another person’s self-conception and how they comport themselves in reality. And in that disjoint is the petri dish for gossip.  

424 Year-Old Mystery 

“The eye sees not itself, but from reflection,” says someone in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a line I’ve been tonguing like one does a loose tooth ever since I first read it in high school. Did he mean that the eye alone, as a tool, can’t see, in the same way a hammer by itself can’t hammer? That the eye, in a dark room, is worthless? Or that the eye can’t see itself in the world except by way of reflection? Or did he mean both? Or did he mean something else? 

Or was it MacBeth?²

Mementos 

I’m using the word “mistrust” deliberately. “Distrust” has a heavier, nastier connotation. It would be awkward, to say the least, and probably psychotic, to go through your own life as a hostile witness. “Mistrust” is a gentler word. I want to regard my own version of events with narrowed eyes, with a considered wariness. It’s going to be alarming in the future when I discover weak spots—when everyone in the room disagrees with me and is on the same page about some otherwise unverifiable past event. Perhaps rehearsing now for inevitable erosion will prepare the ground somewhat.    

Recently I spoke with a friend on the phone who’s long been blessed with an uncanny memory and is now starting to see it fading around the edges. Some people just clearly have more RAM than others, and this one—whom I’ve known so long I literally can’t remember having met—has always been one of those. It set him apart from an early age, catapulted him academically and undergirded his professional achievements. He told me it’s especially annoying that when he tells people about it they all react in the same way: “Oh, that’s just age, it happens to everyone.” It doesn’t feel commonplace to him. His memory has been unfailingly deep, on-demand, foundational and present, on par with any other prodigy for cello or architecture or three-pointers or color theory, since the get-go. Then the second hand registers a neural tock and he is uncertain, reaching, fallible.    

Everyone knows what it’s like to hang out with an old couple who bicker endlessly about the past—about mundane particularities especially. (“It was a Tuesday and we were in Milan—” “It was Florence, the Friday before.” “No it wasn’t, it was Milan, I know because the night before we’d gone to the museum, the fashion museum, and—” “That was the ‘92 trip. You’re thinking of the 1992 trip.” “No it wasn’t. You think I don’t know my years? Anyway…”) We haven’t expressly talked about it, but I think this is one of the behaviors Arielle and I are mutually sworn to avoiding.³ If I find myself on the verge of protesting a detail, I’ll swallow it. Because who cares? But my wife is also happily in the habit of setting out on the trail of a story and sort of making things up as she goes along in an attempt to get to the final destination without hewing fascistically to details. She told me recently that she relaxes when I start telling a shared story in company because she knows she can count on the thing being told. She is already well advanced down the road of cheerful self-mistrust. 

If your memory is a big deal to you, its degrading will be a big deal. If it’s but a component piece of a much more interesting stream, a bug-not-a-feature of ongoingness, you don’t have to take it so seriously. It isn’t hard for me to envision a distant (hopefully very distant) future in which, while I am caterwauling blindly about floorplans that have been rendered, overnight, alien, inking Memento-style “WHAT IS THE VALUE OF A FORGOTTEN LIFE?” all over my sagging body, my wife will be delightedly poring over old photo albums: Who are these beautiful kids???

Photo by Rolands Zilvinskis on Unsplash

Evidence 

My dad has kept annual day-journals going back to the 1970s, when he was in his 20s. Small, slender black volumes in which are recorded a few pithy fragments marking every day of his life. Did laundry. Got married at Memorial Drive Presbyterian. Reception. Honeymoon night at Hyatt Regency reads a notable entry. (Concision, thy name is Jim!) Naturally, I asked him to consult his archive in the wake of the blue Honda Civic controversy.

The evidence was overwhelmingly in favor of my version. It moved my sister not one whit. She is absolutely positive that she never owned a blue Honda Civic and therefore couldn’t have ever sold one to her little brother. That I purchased a blue Honda Civic from someone, that I vividly remember her having it and not wanting it, her having picked me up in the airport with it, that I vividly remember giving her a wad of bills for it in the cul-de-sac (in the cul-de-sac, mind, for such is the pinpoint precision of what I’m convinced I retain of this incident), none of this moves her. If it is possible to vividly recall a negative, she vividly recalls this one.

I remember being a kid at Hyde Park Baptist Junior High School in Austin. In awe of my big sister’s counterculture, free-thinking bona fides (she a trailblazing misfit in the same swamp), I went constantly into battle with my classmates, largely parroting her positions (11-year old Hyde Park boys had, almost unanimously, rather rigid and unexamined belief systems regarding, for instance, abortion). Back then—I think this is true—there were more Muslims in the world than Christians. I remember wielding this statistic as an amateur ontological argument. You are convinced of your rightness, but there are more human beings in the world just as convinced of their rightness. This was I think a protoplasmic blob mother of the philosophy that would come to structure much of my thinking during the formative years, a philosophy I have only recently learned is rooted in an ancient Greek form of skepticism called Pyrrhonism. The Pyrrhonists asserted that every argument had an equal, opposing argument. You can see this as an endorsement of nihilism, and that weirds me out, but my DIY version of Pyrrhonism manifested more as a recognition of gradations in expertise: a sixth-grade argument, any sixth-grade argument, would be bested by an eighth-grade argument, an eighth by an eleventh and so forth. Meanwhile, as arguments combined, clashed and conjugated, sensibilities were derived and aesthetics and  principles—all processes more important than merely being right. Ideas were tried. It’s the journey, not the destination.

(But if [that voice again], nearing the end of the journey, you can’t remember it…? If the destination abolishes the journey…?)

Sharing is Caring

Here’s something wacky: Other people roam the Earth filled in part with memories of your life you don’t have anymore. Evidence of your doings is dispersed among the tribe of people you’ve known. Similarly, you are a repository of truths of other people they have no memory of. 

Your single existence on this planet comprises a narrative that can never be wholly captured, stored or recreated. Biography is collage, the lion’s share of cuttings left on the floor. You are your primary archivist, wearing also the hats of director and star and (hopefully) writer (if not executive producer), but the overspill of your time and days is copiousness itself. Every life is a daily cataract of experience casually overwhelming the levees of our tiny cups. Happily, other people abound, and you never know what bits from the up-splash will stick to them. 

Just think: at your own funeral a bunch of people will volunteer memories of your life you may personally have no ownership of. If cursed or blessed enough to attend, you might well be left scratching your noncorporeal head. “Who the fuck are these guys talking about?” 

1. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, why not optimism? 

2. It was Julius Caesar—act i, scene ii—but I misremembered the line: by reflection, not from. Also it was Julius himself, the top banana, addressing none other than Brutus.

3. In fact my wife assures me we have discussed this: she remembers having issued “a non-negotiable fatwa” forbidding it.