I’m late to the party, but I just watched The Notebook. I’m not sure how this Nicholas Sparks classic evaded me. (Spoiler alert: you can skip this paragraph if you don’t want me to ruin the plot of the movie for you). I love a good tearjerker. Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling are electric as young lovers. James Garner plays the elder version of Gosling’s character. He reads the memoir his wife catalogued before her Alzheimer’s disease progresses. It’s their love story — how they met and came together, and by his reading it to her, she sometimes “comes back” to him, even just for moments. I dare you not to be moved.
Watching it made got me thinking, if I were going to write down moments of my life that I wanted to remember, what would they be? Let’s say you’re giving your life The Notebook treatment, and you wanted to record all kinds of memories from your life — which would you choose?
You have two minutes. Start the timer.
Jot down the first memories that come into your head without overthinking it. What images float to the surface? Do a voice memo, log it onto your phone notepad or scribble on scratch paper. Go ahead. I’ll wait…Okay. When you read over your list, were there any surprises?
Your list may include a lot of the big events in life…
Mine has some grand gestures and watershed moments. One is when my husband gave me my engagement ring. He had proposed a couple months earlier without totally planning to (yes, I was just so overwhelming in my charm he couldn’t help blurting out a proposal right away). So he’d given me a Turkish silver “meantime ring” (we were in Turkey at the time) until he purchased a diamond. A couple months later at the 11p.m. Christmas Eve service at our church, he leaned over to light my candle, and my engagement ring was threaded over it. His family, sitting with us, watched as my face, awash in candlelight, showed my surprise. And the congregation sang the sweetest song of the Christmas season, Silent Night. It was magical.
You might reminisce about your children…
Yes, I’d probably want to write down about my boys’ births and bringing them home from the hospital. But really what I’d want to record is the secret, sleepy times we shared — just the two of us — during late-night feedings when they were babies. That sticky baby smell, a lullaby of Moon River whispered in the thick of night. The wonderment of watching their every eye twitch, hearing their tiny grunts. I’d want to capture the feelings I had back then of sheer gratitude for the gift of being a mom, of the hopes and dreams for the child in my arms. And also of my being overwhelmed by it all.
And as the children grow…
I’d want to remember family moments like Christmas mornings with their ecstatic anticipation and pure joy. Sure, the milestones of graduations, performances and sporting events come to mind. Then again, I’d be more afraid to lose the memories of seemingly inconsequential times with them. Like looking over at my younger son on the sofa all stretched out like a long, lazy cat and seeing how alarmingly large his feet have gotten.
Would you only record happy memories?
I do want to gather up all the life celebrations like a big bundle of sunflowers. And yet, I can’t help but feel the need to want to put down some of the sadness. I think back to some of my lowest, most difficult times when the support of my dear friends has buoyed me so that I could stand upright again. Amidst the pain and sorrow, love and tenderness and strength bloomed. There were lots of tiny miracles scattered in all of that grief. Like in grade school when you had to do that project in art class by poking holes in a sheet of black construction paper. And when you held it up to the light, you might see a neat design. That’s how it is. Even though remembering it all includes darkness, I don’t want to forget it because it includes all the light, too.
And as for your youth…
When I go back further in time, to my own childhood, what to remember? Perhaps the sassy 5-year old I was, sashaying down the avenue with my baton in the Christmas parade. How I loved my little marigold-yellow majorette costume, complete with white fur hat. Don’t you want to see if you can hold onto certain ebullient feelings from your childhood, even those that might be long lost to you now? The ones where you laughed harder or dreamed bigger or romped and skipped and traipsed.
Or maybe a random memory pops up — one you hadn’t realized you’d stored…
It’s sophomore year English in high school, and we’re having class outside on the lawn because it’s such a beautiful spring day (and also because we wore our teacher down.) I see the faces of my classmates, some of whom are my good friends to this day. My legs are stretched out on the grass; I can feel the sun on my face. Our teacher with glossy red hair has to raise her voice above the hum of nature. She’s lecturing about… what, I can’t recall.
Maybe it’s Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth’s poem reflecting on his relationship to nature and his changing attitudes at different periods in his life. Maybe we are reading the line: “the picture of the mind revives again.” About 6-7 years after this class, I would find myself in the Welsh countryside, in the same area where Wordsworth composed these lines, along the banks of the river Wye. And in the roofless ruins, I’d look up at the sky and feel Wordsworth’s appreciation for his oneness with nature when he was a boy. And I’d understand his words to his sister:
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence—wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!