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Larkin

Posted January 21, 2009

What's your earliest vivid memory? For me it is a gray afternoon, and I'm listening to a record about the adventures of a dog named Muffin. Muffin goes wandering out in the world, braves storms, crosses train tracks to the sound of an approaching locomotive. At the zoo he hears the roar of a lion. The roar frightens me, and I flee in terror, running from the living room of our house, right out the front door into the yard. It's winter out, and cold, as my mother rushes after me and hauls me back in, reassuring me that it's just a pretend lion, everything's OK.

Since this event occurred at a house we lived in for just one year, I can peg it to the winter of 1961-62, which means I was three and a half years old. It is a vivid memory, but what about the day before my Muffin escape? In fact, what about the more than one thousand days before that, the entire three-and-a-half-year period in which I was a living, breathing, crawling-walking-talking person, extensively chronicled by my parents in letters and in Kodak snapshots? I don't remember any of it. My entire pre-Muffin life is a void.

Larkin turns three next week, and I'm baffled to think that she isn't yet forming lasting memories. She's still living in her void time. This is a person who steers herself through her day assertively, articulating demands (that's for sure!), making jokes, exhibiting an increasingly fully-fledged personality. A person who says "I want to hop in the car with you and go to the library!" or "Dad, are you sad because you're thinking about your mother?"; who climbs up on the toilet, requests TIME Magazine, and announces "I need some privacy, please!" Yet when it comes to creating lasting memories for herself, she's not even a player yet.

This fact creates a strange imbalance between parents and their toddlers. All that Molly and I have gone through with Larkin these three years, all the joys and perils and insights, all the hilarity: and she won't remember any of it? It's so weird, really. Friends assure you, She may not remember it, but it's still there. I'm sure that's true; but it's not the same as a conscious memory. My friend Jeff Singer, a psychologist and researcher, has coined the phrase "self-defining memories" to describe the experiences that we turn into important stories, recounting them over the years to ourselves and to others, fashioning a way to understand ourselves and our lives.

Our memories -- this grab bag of stories, images, feelings, and lessons -- tell us who we are by reminding us who we were and where we've been. But a toddler isn't putting anything in the bag yet. Molly and I keep hoping that our aged and beloved bulldog, Bert, makes it at least one more year, so that Larkin will have a memory of him. There's an impatience to get her over the hump, get her to the place where it all starts being for keeps.

Becoming a parent lets you test your own pet theories of child development. I have this notion that if I keep reiterating certain experiences, Larkin may be able to hold onto them, and when she gets older they will form a bridge back to her distant past. And so I make a point of revisiting stories with her over and over. Like the time the college-aged daughter of friends of ours gave her a present of "bee boots." Or the day she said bye-bye to binky, when we tied her pacifier to a balloon and let it go in the park.

So will Larkin grow up to be an adult with clear memories of being one year old? Somehow I doubt it. Maybe early childhood is just too threatening and strange to be incorporated into the adult self -- too close to the trauma of birth and the state of nonbeing that preceded it. As one of my favorite writers, Vladimir Nabokov, wrote, the cradle rocks above an abyss. Perhaps we dread our pre-birth oblivion the same way we do the one to come.

The truth is, memory is a limited gift, and even we adults retain precious little of our pasts - a few crumbs and scraps of a colossal feast. Recently I came across the work of Jeff Scher, a painter and experimental filmmaker whose pair of animated short films, "You Won't Remember This," and "You Won't Remember This Either," chronicle the toddler years of his two sons. The cartoons depict his boys, reaching for a teddy bear or digging sand at the beach, against a shimmering, flashing background of animal cracker boxes and cold medicines, post cards, calendars, ticket stubs. His films are "a collection of fleeting glimpses and little moments," Scher writes, "that would otherwise escape forever."

Last night I attended a function and wore a blazer I hadn't worn in over a year. In the middle of the event I reached into a pocket and pulled out... a pacifier. Looking at this relic of Larkin's infancy triggered a slight swoon of nostalgia. So did the ticket stub that fell out of a book the other day -- from a ferry ride we took to Long Island when Larkin was eight months old, our first trip with her. So here's my advice. Save the ticket stubs. Keep a journal. Find some way to get it all down, and try to build that bridge to nowhere -- for her, and for yourself.