Showing posts with label episodic memory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label episodic memory. Show all posts

Monday, July 18, 2022

my episodic memory









the loved one is reading through a stack of her diaries ... going back more than thirty years ... and we had a short conversation about memory in which i gave a frivolous explanation of why i don't keep a diary 

i said, somewhat self-importantly, that I felt no need to file my past in a strict order ... and i went on to suggest that anyway, everything that we can remember seems as if it happened yesterday

but in truth, i would be deeply ashamed to commit a lot of my self-inflicted fiascos and disasters to a journal

later in the day there appeared a short video of a narrow street in a village in northern spain through which three shepherds and a couple of gentle old dogs were leading a large mixed herd of sheep and goats up towards the mountain pastures ... there was a wonderful cacaphony of ancient bells and occasional rasping country voices

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrZ8ORGBlco

and whilst i revelled in that sound, i remembered that i had journeyed not too far away from those shepherds many years since, back in 2001

and suddenly i needed to re-structure a memory

i set about searching the on-line maps to find a village i'd been stranded in when my van broke down ... the water pump had cracked and i had to wait there all day whilst another came fifty miles from the nearest big town, first on a service bus, and then on a school bus

it took a while to locate the village, Zarreu, because i had only remembered the name of the district, Cerredo ... different maps give the village one name or the other

on that morning, unable to converse with the mechanic, i had phoned a good spanish friend and asked him to translate as best he could

and then, all day, i had wandered the few streets of what turned out to be a coal-mining village

the language spoken in the village was an asturian dialect and i felt some connection with the place because my father was the son of a Welsh miner

so i had a vague recollection of the solidarity expressed by many Welsh people for the Asturian miners when they were oppressed, first by the mine owners, then by Franco

just a couple of weeks before this, the twin towers in New York had been destroyed

in the window of the village's tiny "casa cultura", someone had thoughtfully placed a copy of a famous poem about New York by Lorca, the one about black doves

my sense of connection became deeper

the water pump arrived right at the end of the working day, a friday ... but the mechanic said he'd come in first thing next morning to fit it and so i slept in the van that night

he didn't show up

but his apprentice did

after a wait, he decided the boss was probably too drunk to work, and so he did the job himself

it took a couple of hours and whilst i watched, the phone rang in their tiny office

he answered it, expecting a conversation with his boss ... but then he handed the phone to me

it was my friend linda, the english wife of the spaniard i had called for help the previous day

she said i have bad news ... your sister is wanting to contact you because your father has just died

the shed where i heard that news is still there

green door, what's that secret you're keeping ?