November 14, 2023

This past weekend my sister and I went to a vintage Christmas market, and I bought this little treasure from years gone by. It’s a nut chopper.

Of course, I don’t need a nut chopper, for I have a food processor and also a smaller electric one that works beautifully for herbs and nuts, and most often I buy walnuts and pecans already chopped anyway. However, when I picked it up I remembered baking cookies when I was a child. I had instant replay images of kitchens in homes where we lived when I was growing up. Now I hasten to add that my mother was not the kind of Mom who enjoyed cooking with her children. I learned to cook and bake by trial and error. Still, this little glass container with its cheery red top, which just happens to match my current kitchen’s decor, inspired homey, happy thoughts.

Memories were clearly on my mind, especially since last week’s theme for the writing group I facilitate was memory. Before reading the writing prompts to the group, I shared some guiding words, quotations about the topic. For example,

There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and sorrows, and unbelivably, those things get knocked aside as well, until one morning you’re picking cherries with your three grown daughters and your husband goes by on the Gator and you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the world.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, p. 116

Remembering events and people from our past lets us claim and share ourselves…We do not merely have these memories; we are these memories…memory is a way of describing the cumulative nature of time, the presence of the past with us. Time not only unravels; it also knits up…memories reveal God’s presence in our life. Memories retrace a sacred journey.

Winter Grace, Spirituality and Aging by Kathleen Fischer, p. 45

The prompts included choosing a decade of your life and writing down as many memories of that decade as you can, or writing about an experience when your memory is contradicted by someone’s version of the same experience or event, or encouraged by Kathleen Fischer’s words, “open the album of your life,” and simply begin writing.

My own response during the 20 minutes of writing time was inspired by what John O’ Donohue says in Eternal Echoes, Exploring Our Yearning to Belong, “Memory is the place where our vanished days secretly gather. Memory rescues experience from total disappearance.”

Lost Memories

A few months before he died, I asked my father what memories he had about Christmas when I was a little girl. My father had an excellent memory, which he nurtured and worked to maintain. For example, when he was in his 90’s he wrote down the names of everyone in his first grade class. Eventually, he remembered each name. He also made a list of everyone who reported to him during his long and successful career.

Here’s the rub: He had no memories of Christmas when I was a little girl. Over the years he had shared his own early Christmas memories, like getting an orange in his stocking and going ice skating on Fountain Lake on Christmas Day, but he was not able to unveil memories about me at Christmastime.

It was clear he was disturbed by this lack of memories, and he quickly said something like “Your mother handled Christmas,” and I’m sure that was true, but really? Nothing about my first Christmas morning or presents I loved or how I reacted to the Christmas tree? Frankly, I was hurt. I changed the subject, wishing I had never brought it up. Later I wondered if bringing some family pictures or sharing my own early memories would have induced a different outcome.

I hasten to add, and I want you to hear this clearly, I have no doubts about how much my father loved me. I have never questioned that, and I treasure my relationship with him, but I am aware that some of the details of my life, stories I would like to know, have disappeared.

When I asked my father to share memories about me as a little girl, I unintentionally opened a place of sadness in him, an emptiness he didn’t know he had. I’m not sure that was a good thing, unless I can use it to learn something about myself and my own memories. What do I most need to remember and even more, what memories about my loved ones do they need and want to know?

Joan Chittister in The Gift of Years, Growing Older Gracefully refers to memories as both burdens and blessings. What I choose to remember and share can be either a burden or a blessing for my loved ones. My hope is that this incident with my beloved father can be remembered as a sacred moment, for as Chittister says, memories, can “tell us what is left to be done. They become a blueprint for tomorrow that show us out of our own experience how to live, how to forget, how to go on again.” And I add, how and what to remember.

Now about that nut chopper. I won’t use it for its intended purpose, but instead I will fill it with red and green Christmas M and M’s, as a glimpse into sweet memories.

An Invitation

When have memories been a burden and when have they been a blessing in your life? I would love to know.