In the last week, my child has begun clapping, waving, feeding herself small pieces of food, and crawling, if one uses a very broad and generous definition of any of these activities. There was one day in which she was unable to grasp small chunks of pineapple between her thumb and pointer finger at breakfast. Three hours later, at lunch the same day, she had figured it out. The other night I tried switching my chopsticks to my left hand to see if I could still get that udon noodle where it needed to go, and I thought of what Arden must experience on a daily basis... the sense of bodily disconnect and frustration. And what a delight it must be to learn something so integral to survival. (eating, locomotion, self-congratulation etc.)
It strikes me how long it's been since I learned a new skill with such alacrity, or any new skill at all for that matter. Yes, the learning curve is steepest at the beginning, hence the wonders of infancy, but as a full-fledged adult now, I fear that as opposed to leveling off, I have perhaps started sliding back down the hill from whence I came. I am forgetting things at a more rapid clip than I am learning new things, and this net loss is unsettling. It is urgently making me want to re-read every book I have ever read. I want to revisit my college papers, though I'd probably be so underwhelmed by their lack of original thought, maybe it's best to leave those supposed intellectual glory days in the box of floppy disks where they are. I used to have muscle memory in my soccer feet, but it's been years since I could really dribble and land a good, accurate goal kick. I guess this is one of the benefits of creating spawn... as they follow in your footsteps, scholastic and otherwise, from Dickens to Trigonometry, from memorizing poetry to slide-tackling, you get to revitalize these regions of your brain that have been lying undisturbed for so long.
Sean once read somewhere that memory is like a pathway through grass. The more you walk down it, the more the neurons grow accustomed to making that trodden-down trail. If you walk someplace only once, and never revisit it, soon the grasses grow over, and it's as if you were never there. Thank goodness for photographs and journals which help mow narrow swaths through the overgrown meadow. But there have been times when I've found something so achingly beautiful, from a vista to a passage in book, to a bemused expression on my girl's face, that I've tried to order my brain to take the mental picture, to commemorate it instantly, to put florescent flags and breadcrumbs all along the pathway so that it would be impossible to lose the trail. Sometimes the act of remembering in advance is useful, but I tend to remember my desire for the perfect memory, rather than the thing itself. I can picture myself on the Pont des Arts - or was it the Pont au Change? - in Paris, with Sean in the summer of 2007, an electric and apocalyptic sunset raging to the west behind the turreted skyline, and wanting desperately to commit it to memory. A mere three years later, I don't know what it really looked like. But I do remember the desperation in wanting to. I can never remember what specific things have made me laugh to the point of tears. But I do remember laughing that hard. Nor will I necessarily remember the exact nature of Arden's otherworldly baby coos that make me wild with adoration for her. But I'll love her that madly because the deepest trenches in memory are the ones that are everywhere and nowhere... that are exponentially too big and too numerous for specific memories. Maybe this is why poets gave us the notion of the heart... because it seems unlikely that something that fails us so frequently as memory stored in the brain, could also be responsible for love. Thank goodness love isn't something that has to be remembered.
