The Memory Thing

Last night our neighbors across the road, K. and his wife L., held an event that has become something of a tradition -- a birthday party for him that features poetry readings by all in attendance.

I never read my own poetry. Instead Last year I read from Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."

For this year I decided to try to recite, as much as I could, from memory,the first sections of one of my very favorite poems, "Snowbound," by John Greenleaf Whittier.

Whittier is big in my book because of two things: he wrote "Snowbound," and he was a staunch abolitionist.

In "Snowbound" he beautifully recalls a snowstorm from his boyhood days on a farm in Massachusetts. I thought it was especially apt because just a few days earlier K. and I had been lamenting that nowadays we don't have nearly the number of memorable snows that we used to get 20 or 30 years back. In fact most years we hardly get any at all.

I knew from the start that this would be a much more formidable undertaking than it would have been long ago when I was 20 or 30 and my memory was still good enough that I could play chessgames blindfold. "Snowbound" is 600 lines long, and it's too bad that I didn't attempt to memorize it in those earlier days. I think I could have done it, but I only tried later, and never got much above 100 lines, and before yesterday I could only have been sure of the first 8.

Also there would be people looking at me, and in addition, as soon as I got to the party, I shot myself in the knee by drinking a glass of wine. Whatever the reason, from my point of view my reading was a disaster, though I was assured by one and all that it was a big success.

First of all, before I even got started I had to stop midway in my introduction because I suddenly started losing my voice -- it was the wine, everything was the fault of the wine -- and I had to get a glass of water before I could go on. Then I got up to about the 30th line and stumbled and had to consult the copy I had in my pocket. And later I stumbled some more, and finally, somewhat short of where I had hoped to end, I had to end while reading entirely from the sheet.

I subjected myself to this reciting from memory in the presence of others because, fascinated by the changes associated with getting elderly, as I seem to be, I just wanted to see, first, how much I could memorize anew, and second, how much of it I would be able to recite. Before leaving home I did manage to rememorize quite a chunk, and now with nobody around and no alcohol affecting the blood in my head, I think I could recite everything that I had tried to pack into my head, 114 lines in all.

It was an unusual night for my usually heavily subdued ego. With thousands of poems around here to choose from, for her contribution my wife read a published poem written by none other than me, and believe it or not, I listened with as much interest as anyone else, because I had completely forgotten that I had written the poem or that it was in that anthology. In fact, I still barely remember the poem, and that is troubling.

Later, another close neighbor and friend, G., with whom I pitch horseshoes almost weekly, decided he would follow up "Snowbound" by relating episodes involving me, him, and snowstorms of the past. In the course of the last one, he spoke of how I, while in my 60's, rode down our steep, ice-covered road on a sled. He asked if I remembered that, and he was badly disappointed when it turned out that I didn't, though others there did.

This night reminded me that in spite of my best efforts, I have lost big chunks of my earlier life, parts that had finally existed only in my memory. But I'm aware of the advantages of that, too.