I got a letter today, recalling my vehicle for a small adjustment and it got me thinking about life and the need to recall. There is, of course, the wonderful example of Mary who treasured up memories to ponder on later. She could at a later time reach into her treasure chest of memories and be encouraged and soothed by special, awkward and painful times.
How can one word have two radically different meanings?
Recalling concerning revoking, or bring back was first used in 1580’s French and thirty years later it began to be used in the sense of bringing back to memory. Eidetic memory or photographic memory is the ability to totally recall events as if they were in front of you.
I have always struggled with this photographic memory I had no need to hone. It was just there, not always wanted. I think it sometimes annoys people that I remember clothes, stance, words, nuance.
Last year someone clearly said something to me that knocked me a bit, it didn’t floor me or make me curl into a ball. But a few months later when they denied or forgot they had spoken those words I wondered. I could clearly recall them and yet they couldn’t do the same thing.
When I recall now distant memories from my childhood, I wonder how much is skewed by my perception or whether it is coloured by others perceptions. For example, I had an ace day once with my dad on the dodgems at a local fair in some kind of town or village. When I got home, for once I gave up the information about where I had been and how good it had been. Stony silence was followed by “he only took you because he wanted to go”
But now I wonder… why the stoniness… why the fair?
Did I actually experience this event or has my perception been so skewed?
I sometimes long for a letter to come to recall me to the factory to be reset to default settings.
Rebuilding Community 