I’ve written before about not remembering my childhood with any sort of accuracy. I’ve forgotten major vacations completely only to be reminded by a photograph that I actually did see Mount Rushmore in person during a vacation over my birthday. While this sort of memory loss is tragic and embarrassing I’ve come up with an at hand rationale for my inability to remember: I had to make room for Grad School. All joking aside, photographs have reminded me of some of the most interesting/wonderful/joyous forgotten moments of my life. Oftentimes those pictures are my primary link to things I’ve forgotten. Baby pictures, especially, provide me with an insight into a world I couldn’t remember. These photographs often form my only understanding of myself as a baby.
Photographs aren’t the only things that can help with memory. Over the holiday my mother had me search through a box down in our basement that had my name on it. It was a small box but a full one. It had school assignments I’d completed with glue, markers, and handwriting (this was before we had access to computers). It had pictures, candles, birthday cards, and other items from days long gone. It was my own personal time capsule. This box was a gift from my parents. The gift was tactile memory. One of the items in the box (the one my mother sent me hunting for) was a pair of overalls I had worn around the age of 6 months. They were given to my mother by her former employer as a wedding gift (I think) and had my name initialed on the side along with stitching that read “Irish Import” (suggesting that, perhaps, I would be/had been conceived in Ireland where they spent their honeymoon). I’d seen photos of me in these before and very much liked them. Ealier this week my son put them on, past and future collided, and I couldn’t have been more proud. I was looking at the closest version of myself at 6 months that I would ever see… and I was happy.