First smile: Piecing together a memory

The more I plumb my memories, which tend to link with almost any theme or subject I tackle, the more I’m convinced that not facts but feelings anchor us to our past. No matter how studies on the role of memory in everyday life place learning, meaning knowledge skills, at the core, I associate most of what I seem to have stored even from schooling with images triggered by sights, sounds, textures and emotions. Scholars and practicing psychologists would argue against this, I imagine, as these seem to defy any kind of measurement.

Yet, indeed, an article, “Stages of Memory – Encoding Storage and Retrieval by McLeod, S. A. (2007)” published in simplypsychology.org, reveals that at most attempts to measure this amazing brain function in a laboratory could only yield generalized results—how could it be otherwise in an artificial setting? But researches and studies continue to decode what the brain does to memories.

A growing concern about dementia and Alzheimer’s that befall not only the elderly but recently also younger adults have thickened such studies. While findings remain open-ended, programs that revisit memories have since enlivened patients in Adult Care centers with vintage music, movies, books and games of their youth. I’ve witnessed poignant scenes in a few of these, where even those in stupor leap out of their limbo, hence, reinforcing my belief that memory deepens not by facts but by sensory imprints.

While the expanse of my recollections, as it has been quite obvious in most of what I’ve written appears vivid, there’s just one, of which I have none but suppositions—a snap shot of my sister 11 years younger than me; I had just shed off my rag dolls as a world of my own world started swirling in at her birth. And so, my sister’s first smile, what to my mother could have been a milestone, for me, remains this sketchy:

I remember that early morning light. It poured in through a window facing east. It could have been a Saturday morning. My mother could have been home. If it were a weekend, I must have been sleeping late. It couldn’t but be a Saturday otherwise this picture wouldn’t have been taken by an uncle who also taught at the parish school. So why am I making a fuss this late?

Because I wish I could relate a more credible story as to that first smile. I remember my sister more as fretful. She cried when she felt sleepy or couldn’t sleep. She cried when she woke up and felt hot. She hardly smiled. She seemed to size up people as if already making opinions as they talked.

The story my mother recalls of this morning has to do with impulses. This uncle, who lived on the other corner of our street, apparently just happened to drop by with his camera. He just suddenly wanted to take a picture of my 5-month old sister. My sister just then was learning to turn on her side. That morning, she happened to do a full turn to lie on her belly. She just happened to smile. Or maybe I was there to clown around when my uncle clicked his Kodak Field camera. But I recall none of that.

Does our memory kind of rearrange the truth? Think again of the Mamasapano “piecing together sessions”—somehow, for me, what truly happened and who should own up to it seemed to have quivered like jelly and slipped between fingers. Some studies, which focus on the brain’s memory-retrieval function relate to trauma, so strong that the brain could even block out whole episodes. Or to escape the weight of truth, the brain “selects” what it remembers. But I can honestly say, none of these played a role in my pencil-thin recollection of my sister’s snap shot. Maybe, a dreamboat simply distracted me.