Recognition

“Your memories are what we came for.”

The Wild Robot

On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”

This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times.

Czech novelist Milan Kundera in his classic novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

My Uncle Freddie, who wasn’t really my uncle, used to tell my father, whose name was also Fred, “I bet you would not recognize me if you saw me on the street”, to which my Father (Fred) would reply,”Freddie, I would recognize you anywhere.“ They would repeat this routine every time they met.

My Uncle Freddie, whose wife Doris was actually my Mother’s cousin, was a baker for most of his life. He had also been a pilot in the Royal Canadian Airforce in WW2. As a man in his eighties, he would often reflect on this time in the service. He had a photo of his handsome younger self in uniform in his empty wallet. He would have been in his 20’s, an impressionable time in the human life. He was overseas fighting for his country in a war, to not only save Canada and Europe, but to defeat the Fascists in Germany.

My Father Fred was also in the service, but he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy as a sailor. He never talked about his experience in the War, and if he did mention it, it was only in passing. He would often tell stories of dating my Mother, who was in WACs, the female side of the Navy.

They met in Halifax during the war. There are pictures of my Mother with her cousin Doris, sun bathing in the nude, their hair is long, and their bums are bare. There are also pictures of the boyfriend she had before my Father. Please remember they were all in their 20’s, and though it was wartime, life was not always serious. There was time for laughter, and time tor romance and adventure.

My Mother stayed in a rooming house, which had strict visiting times, run by an “old battle ax”, as my Mother called her. My Father would tell us of sneaking into the rooming house after hours to “visit” with my Mother, they having to keep very quiet to avoid stirring the “old battle ax.”

One day my Dad was ordered to board a ship. I’m not sure where that boat took him, as he didn’t speak of it. But my mother said he was not recognizable when he returned, presumably because he had lost weight while on ship. If you look at photos of my Dad from that time, he did not have lots of weight to lose,

It is easy to forget the service and bravery of that generation as they went into the unknown to keep us all free. Most of them are no longer with us, except the few who are now well over 100 years old. Both of my parents are gone. My Uncle Freddie and Aunt Doris are also gone.

When Doris died, they spoke of her last days, and how it seemed she was greeting all her relatives who had died before her. She was walking into this new world, a beautiful world of light, and they were all there to greet her.

When my Father died, I rememberI had a dream, where in perfect dream logic, I surmised that since my genes and cells and dna came from my Father, that if I only concentrated, I could will my cells to remember his memories and to bring these memories and stories that he would never tell again, back to life. Just as I was about to concentrate and retrieve my ancestral gifts, I awoke.

The magic of my dream was over, with any chance of retelling my Dad’s stories gone with the dream.

Memories are like that. They often disappear when you need them most. Sometimes they are not really gone, they just remain hidden, waiting to be uncovered by the enquiring mind of history.

When my Mother went through her final decade of dementia, we would think she had lost her memories. But what if she had not lost them? What if she had only lost her ability to express them? What if her memories were still alive and swirling about inside her? What if when she was quiet and withdrawn, in her mind she was reliving her wartime romances, or walking on the beach as a child in White Rock?

What if she was the little girl at her family dinner table, watching her father take out his glass eye, a parlour trick he was known to perform, or hearing her own mother tell her to keep her elbows off the table, or lecture her that getting up from the table in the middle of dinner to use the toilet was a practice she called “pulling an Amy”. Presumably there had been a real Amy who had this habit.

As it was, we did not have this insight when she was alive. Our poor mother, the mother we remembered from our childhood, was gone. Although there may have been days when she would say something, some odd disconnected thought, which would give us a glimmer of her former sparkle.

Life changes us. The other day, I watched an old video of Les Goodman After Dark, my live late night talk show from the late 80’s. I would have been in my late twenties or early thirties. My hair was black in this video. I remember dying it a blue black, a sort of dark navy blue. The wild anarchic show was hilarious, a time capsule from another life. Was the current me even recognizable in that youthful handsome face?

During my cancer treatment, I remember how my face and body changed, as a result of the radiation and chemo. I lost about 45 lbs, and I was noticeably thinner, gaunt even. My face was so changed that the facial recognition software on my phone and banking etc, no longer worked. I was a different person. Would facial recognition programmes have recognized me in my youth?

I was no longer recognizable. As such, I didn’t have access to any of my funds, without further verification of my identity. It was bad enough having to go through the cancer treatment, and to daily discover new side effects, new losses, but there was a special pain in losing my identity in the process.

As I sing in my song Happy Mother’s Day:

Everyday I sit

I don't remember shit

They say that's why I'm here

They covered all the mirrors....

and I ...

I don't recognize your face

or that look

that look of sadness in your eyes

when you say: ( they say)

Happy Mother's Day

Merry Christmas

Happy Birthday

I wish you all the best

And I thank you for these memories.

But I forgot your names anyway.....

“This is not collective consciousness, but collective anti-consciousness. The “woke mind virus” that tech lords rail against is a front for their actual fear: that you are observant, awake, and alive.”

Sarah Kendzior

Memories are funny things. They come to us without much prompting. They are random and sometimes they are unexpected.

I remember how I loved my blue Sir Jac jacket with the plaid lining. One day it went missing. I could not explain its disappearance. It had simply vanished.

Perhaps 6 months later, someone came to our door, and in their hands was the blue Sir Jac jacket. It was faded and the plaid lining was torn.

Then I remembered how the jacket went missing in the first place.

It was summer, and we had been playing in a field near our subdivision. Our subdivision was built on farmland, as there were still some farms around us. It had been a hot day and I guess I took off my jacket, leaving it on the ground in the field. I must have forgotten it there for a few seasons, as summer turned into fall and then winter, with its snow and frost.

A Samaritan found it in the spring, faded from its time spent in the field, alone, and me just going one with my life, unaware of how I had casually taken it off, and stupidly forgot all about it.

I wore that faded jacket for a few more years. My Mother would ask me why I was wearing that old faded jacket.

In that same field, was an abandoned barn. We were playing there, doing all the dumb teenage things we would do. My friend Steve’s younger brother David had climbed up to the hay loft, one level above the rough concrete floor. I don’t recall what happened, but David fell from the loft to the hard cement below. He ended up in a body cast for many months.

There are not always consequences to our stupid behaviour. Sometimes we just did real stupid things, and life went on, because stupid things are a part of life.

Our subdivision was called Rock Creek, with houses built around a golf course. We would go out in the evening and vandalize the golf course, stealing the flags, leaving them on the grass, holes away from where they had been. An official of the golf course sometimes would chase us in his golf cart.

Another time of year we would steal Christmas lights from our neighbours, and smash them on the streets.

One day my Dad found a box of these lights in our garage. “Where did these come from?”

We had a friend named Tammy, and our little gang would come around to talk to her. Her Dad came to the door, and gave us hell for stealing some of his lights. He said if we didn’t put them back, we couldn’t talk with his daughter. So we stole some more from other houses and put them back in his outdoor sockets.

Other times, my friend Doug and I would just walk around. We would take his dog Harry with us. One day, Doug and I were sitting on a curb, and Harry came up and lifted his leg, peeing on Doug.

There was another time we were hanging out at Burger’s house. We decided to try chewing tobacco. Beechnut. The one that came in a pouch. No one told me that you had to spit out the tobacco juice, so I swallowed it. Then I turned green. I might have thrown up in my mouth a bit.

My older brother Brent chewed Skoal, which came in a small round box that he kept in his back pocket. Over time the Skoal would create a bleached ring on the back pocket of his faded blue Levis. I guessed it was a badge of honour.

In Junior High, we walked around with foot long bubble gum hanging from our back pockets, a cinnamon tooth pick dangling from our lips. They had been soaked in cinnamon oil, and would burn our mouths.

Random memories come to me as part of the process of recognition. Do I recognize myself in these previous versions of me, as I review my pathway from child to man?

If I met my younger self on the street one day, would I even recognize me?

Oh Dennis, I would recognize you anywhere…….says my Dad’s voice.