George Jonas (born June 15, 1935), a Hungarian-born Canadian writer and columnist has penned this first-person account on Losing Your Past To The Memory Hole
TORONTO, Ontario (National Post), December 28, 2007:
Many years ago I landed at the London, Ontario, airport on my first solo cross-country flight as a student pilot. When I took my logbook into the office for the instructor to sign, a pilot lounging in the room remarked: “Ah, your first solo cross-country! You’ll never forget it.”
I wish. In fact, I remember nothing about it, except this moment. The rest is barely a blur, neatly stored next to the other blurs that make up one’s recollections of a life.
It’s true that the blurs include many “firsts.” One’s first dinner jacket — in my case a hand-me-down from my grandfather. I remember the garment, kind of, but have only the dimmest recollection of the social event for which I needed it. My first kiss — or rather my first non-kiss, because at the age of eleven I had no idea why “forfeit” in a certain parlour game required me to go with a girl of about my age into another room. She knew, but I didn’t. After a few seconds of being alone with her I said: “Now what?” whereupon she tossed her head, turned on her heels, and walked out of the room, mortally offended.
What about my first fully consummated kiss? Sorry; I don’t remember.
When you’re old, all you’ll have is your memories, people say. They don’t add: if you’re lucky. The fact is, an early sign of getting old is a leaky memory. Another sign is feeling a sense of accomplishment after you tie your shoelaces. “Look, Mabel, I tied them. No big deal.”
Yes. It used not to be.
It’s hard enough to hang on to your strength, dexterity or material possessions, but never mind — you can cope with the present shrinking and the future becoming uncertain, what really irks is the gradual loss of the one thing that was supposed to be definitely yours: the past. Well, whatever the good news, the bad news is your past is trickling down what George Orwell called the memory hole.
In Orwell’s dystopian novel nineteen eighty-four the memory hole was politically selective, but in ordinary aging it’s temporally selective, usually on a last-hired-first-fired basis. In the sheltered workshop of the mind older memories have seniority. They have job security, up to a point, while recent memories are the first to go.
My father was just shy of 90 when I walked into his living room to see him standing, cane in hand, next to his favorite
armchair.
“What would you like, Daddy?” I asked. “I’ll get it for you.”
“Ha!” he replied. “If I knew what I wanted, I’d get it myself.”
That was recent memory letting my father down, but his old memory wasn’t entirely immune. I was with him in a restaurant some years earlier, when an old woman emerged from a back room to greet him. “Oh, it’s you,” she said to my father, “I don’t believe it! How long has it been, my goodness, how long?”
“How are you, Emily?” he asked her.
“I’m okay, but… oh, I don’t know how to tell you,” she said. “Ginger is gone.”
Father put on a grave expression, then shrugged after she left the table. “Emily was a cigarette-girl in a nightclub, before the war,” he explained. He meant the First War, of course.
“And Ginger?” I asked.
“Ah, Ginger,” my father said, looking into the middle distance with what seemed like misty eyes. “You know, I haven’t a clue.”
A writer friend called from England the other day. “Old age is not for sissies,” he said when I asked him how he was. It wasn’t an original observation, but an accurate one, although of course “old age” isn’t strictly chronological. You are no doubt as old as you feel — up to a point. After that point, a 70-year-old can look pretty silly if he starts acting like a 30-year-old even if he feels like one.
I had a cousin who didn’t mind looking silly. When he was in his late 70s he kept propositioning women in their 30s. His line never varied. “I’d like to go to bed with you,” he’d say, “and please don’t think about it too long, I haven’t got much time.”
What did the women answer, you ask? Well, most laughed and said no, thanks. Two laughed and said yes, please. It was all my cousin could handle.
In case you wonder what made me write this piece, there’s a photograph on my wall, showing an old man sitting at a sidewalk café in Paris. There’s a glass of wine in front of him and an old dog at his feet. He looks the way I feel, trying to remember.
© 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications Inc
