If Only Memories Could Take Us to Another Place and Time

The Boston Globe

I wish time were physical, something you could touch and see, a giant, football-field-sized collage laid out for perusing. Only instead of chronological still shots of your life there were collections of moving pictures. Pause and choose, then step into the past the way Mary Poppins whisked the Banks children out of a drab, London day into a magical, colorful park simply by stepping into a sidewalk painting.

Wanted for Mother's Day: A trap door. A rabbit hole. A portal.

Except trap doors, rabbit holes, and portals, and even Mary Poppins, are inventions, fantasies dreamed up by writers, ideas that exist only in our minds.

And yet, are not our minds portals, too? Peek inside, and everything we are and were exists, every age we ever were, every personality we tried on even for a day, everything we've ever been.

And no one is missing in our minds. There's no empty place at a table. Grandparents. Parents. Friends. Children. Husbands. Wives. They're all there. All you have to do is think of them and, presto, they appear. There's my mother young. And there she is not so young. And there are my kids, babies and teenagers and adults all at the same time. And look at me. I am 7 years old wearing a wool coat that itches.

It's an amazing gift, memory. And yet it lacks the drama of stepping into a painting, or falling down a rabbit hole. "I remember," I say. I remember climbing up on a chair in my kitchen at 9 Davis Road, so that my mother can brush my hair. I remember her cotton house dress, the fresh-from-the-line smell of it. I remember her slippers flap-flapping on the linoleum floor. I remember her Infant of Prague statue and all its frilly dresses.

But it's a grab bag, memory. It's not sequential and it's not a story. You reach in and you get what you get. Years are snippets, lifetimes just minutes. Nothing is cataloged. There's no Dewey Decimal system. But it's all that we have. And without it, we'd have nothing.

I remember my friend Anne's daughter, Amy. I love remembering her, 11 going on 23, smart, funny. I remember the sound of her recorder, every note perfect. I remember her playing dress-up then singing a song on her front hall stairs with my daughter, Lauren. I remember her cartwheeling across my garage floor, "The Rainbow Connection" playing on the radio. I remember watching her take her pills, every day, dozens of them, to combat cystic fibrosis. Part of the routine. No big deal.

Ideal would be a portal. Ideal would be to step into a moving picture and spend real time with Amy, all of us in her playroom, her mother and brother, my kids small, the fire burning, some game spread out on the floor, boas and dress-up things on the floor, too. Cacophony. All the kids talking at once. "Watch me, Mom. Watch me!"

And then to see what came next.

Memory doesn't take you to next.

There's a scene in the 1986 film "Peggy Sue Got Married" in which Peggy Sue, 25 years out of high school, finds herself not 40-something anymore and at her high school reunion, but magically, on the outside anyway, 18 again. She spends a day at her high school in her younger body, then races back to a home she hasn't been to in decades, hurrying inside, calling for her mother. And when her mother turns to greet her, Peggy Sue gasps because she sees her mother so luminously young.

That's what a portal would do. Leave us all gasping.

Memory would leave us gasping, too, if we weren't so accustomed to it. But it's a daguerreotype in a digital world. It can't be shared with a click and a send. It can't be uploaded to YouTube. It's personal and it's primitive and it's far from perfect, but it's phenomenal, too. We get people back with a thought. Not forever. But for a while. Not in the flesh and blood that we miss, that changes even as we watch and is eventually gone.

But we get their essence. Who they were. And who they are, still.