Access to my random memory

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

The very helpful people at Western Digital recovered 2,408,409 lost files for me.

The problem is, I didn't lose 2½ million files.

How any of my files went missing is a mystery. When my computer was reset recently, I had backed up all my files on an external hard drive. All should have been well. But at the end of an otherwise typical day, I couldn't retrieve any of the files I had downloaded or copied from March 2013 to May 2014.

I still had nine years of files. A single year shouldn't matter. That's what I kept telling myself as I banged my head against a wall.

But it did. I could live without lost correspondence. I could replace missing columns. I could rewrite half-done drafts of things. But what I couldn't replace and what I mourned were all the lost pictures: the first year of my youngest grandson's life. The day he was born. The day he came home from the hospital. His christening. His first birthday. Every shot I took at a friend's wedding. First day of school pictures. Birthdays and holidays and family celebrations. My husband's retirement party.

I sent the external drive to Western Digital. "The pictures are not gone yet," my husband, my cheerleader, would say every time I'd lament the loss of some event, like the kids' Christmas party or school play. And when the drive finally arrived back in the mail after months of waiting, he grinned and said, "See!"

I hooked it up to my computer and held my breath. And the next sentence should read, "And, guess what? I got my year back." But I got way, way more than a year. I got every picture that ever was or ever had been on my computer, times 10.

This is not a criticism. As my friend Brian Patton's mother would say, it is just an observation. This is what happened: If a picture had 10 people in it, I got that picture back, plus separate pictures of all the 10 people.

And then each of those pictures was replicated at least a half-dozen times. And this happened again and again, to every picture I ever took or scanned or downloaded.

It was a science project gone awry, one cell dividing and subdividing over and over and over.

There is no order to the recovered pictures, either. They are not labeled or dated or chronological or anything. They are 2½ million photographs thrown helter-skelter into an old trunk, 1990 next to 1964 next to now. How, in this mess, would I ever find a single year?

It was overwhelming flicking through all these photos, not knowing one Halloween from the next, having to count candles on every birthday cake to figure out the age of the birthday boy or girl.

But, after a while all this randomness became fun, not knowing what would show up on the screen next, surprised to see my parents posing under a wooden sign at Santa's Village in the 1950s; then my grandson Adam, playing his cello in a school concert; then me posing in front of the house I grew up in with Chuck Hibbett the night of my senior prom. And then, look, there's Euan being baptized.

Every day now, as I riffle through some more photos in search of my lost year, I think that though life is lived chronologically, memory is exactly like these pictures, a random mess of images and events the mind stores and replicates and even exaggerates, sometimes.

Random events play over and over, who knows why: sitting on my front steps on a summer night with Janet Butler, both of us kids; my father dying; a man whose book of poetry I bought, Lenny Silver, why am I suddenly thinking of him? Everything willy-nilly, 55 years ago popping up right next to 10 years ago popping up next to 40 years ago.

Just like the pictures.

A mess or a treasure chest?

Maybe each is a little of both.