Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, writes, “A good, sacred memory, preserved from our childhood, is perhaps the best education. If one carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days.” If Dostoyevsky is right, and I believe he is, then I am safe to the end of my days.

 

I have memories, and they are my memories. What I mean by “my memories,” is that they often differ (sometimes, greatly) from the memory other people have of that same ‘moment.’ This disconnect (the inconsistency, in our different memories, of content and context) used to bother me. As a teenager I struggled (often with great frustration) to come to terms with why my recollection of something was so different than that of someone else. Today, being married for a really long time, having three grown sons, and being a teacher and a writer…well, today, I know, for a fact, that no memory is ever shared in the same way by any two people. Today, I’m okay with my memories, of a moment, being different from the memories of others. Today, in fact, the inconsistency of content and context makes me happy.

 

For a little over a decade in the 1970’s, my family lived in the town of Panchgani—a Maharashtrian hill station fifty kilometers south of Pune, India. A community of shop-keepers, teachers, and farmers neatly nestled beneath a dormant volcano on the western face of the Sahyadri mountain range. In 2010, at the age of forty-five, I returned to India. I’d left her twenty-nine years earlier, in 1982—a few days after my sixteenth birthday. Like I said, I have memories.

 

For the first few years, say from 1969, through the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971, well into Indira Gandhi’s State of Emergency, and to the day my brother and I sneaked into a theater (through the bathroom window) at the age of ten (to see the adult-rated movie Sholay) there were only two non-Indian boys in Panchgani: Me and my brother. Both of us were very white, sort of blond, and one of us had green eyes. Like I said, I have my memories.

 

My brother thinks we bribed the ticket-collector and went straight through the theater’s front door to see Sholay. But, he was only eight at the time. So, it’s easy for me to forgive him for being wrong.

 

The memory of seeing Sholay for the first time, for Indians my age, is like asking people my mother’s age, “Where were you when JFK was shot?” Or “Where were you when you heard that Elvis was dead?” Sholay was that big a deal. Big enough that everyone remembers their first time with Sholay. We all have our “Sholay Memory.”

 

When a memory is a good one, like my first time with Sholay, it has the ability to become something more than a memory—something better. It could become a story. And stories are powerful things. Tim O’Brien talks about stories in his novel The Things They Carried. This is O’Brien’s sort-of-factual-but-totally-true-fictionalized-tale-of-his-and-others’-Vietnam-experience. According to O’Brien, “Stories are for joining the past to the future.” O’Brien’s narrator says, “Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.” 

 

A few years ago, my mother published a memoir of our time in India. Its called, An Okie in a Sari. It’s all very factual. Very true. A kind of primary source. My mother’s book would do well in a court of law.

 

My mother was born and raised in Perry, Oklahoma. “Perry, Oklahoma,” according to the census chart I looked up on Wikipedia, “Had 4,209 residents in 1955.” That was the year my mother would have started High School. Based on the stories my mother tells of her growing up in Perry, I would guess that at least 4,200 of the residents were white, most of them blondish, and many with green eyes. My mother has a good memory and our time in India gave her many memories.

 

I published a novella, fifteen years ago, called Wave Watcher. It is set in Brazil. However, every bit of the plot and almost all of the characters are born out of the memories I have of me growing up in that hill station set in the Sahyadri mountains. The house by the beach, in my novel, is really the camp site my brother and I had by the Krishna river; the river that ran through the valley below our home in the Western Ghats. My stories, however, will not hold up in a court of law.

 

Both my mother and I published works that emerged from our memories of the same time and place and people. But, you would never know it. Not ever.

 

Somewhere else in The Things They Carried, O’Brien writes, “It's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. The pictures get jumbled, you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.” 

 

Of course O’Brien is talking about “War Stories.” He’s talking about Vietnam. But, is that all he’s talking about? Aren’t all our lives filled with “booby traps” exploding? Do we not, as children caught in what will be a memory which may become a story, “Close our eyes and duck and float outside ourselves?” Don’t our pictures get jumbled? Doesn’t the “surreal seemingness” of our stories better represent the hard and exact truth better than what actually happened?

 

For instance, here are seven things that actually happened?

• When I was five my grandparents had a Chihuahua named Cricket. Cricket was not a friendly dog to me. He would often nip at me when I teased him.

• When I was thirteen years old our doctor diagnosed me with an enlarged liver.

• In 1995 my middle son pushed my youngest son into the coffee-table and he split his ear open. Our dog, prompted by empathy, went over and licked my son’s face as well as his bleeding ear.

• My maid once told me that her son lost the tip of his toe by getting his bare foot caught in between the chain and sprocket of his bicycle.

• One of my nephews was born with a hole in his heart.

• My youngest son’s middle name is Louis.

• In 2005 I published, Wave Watcher, my novel.

 

Here’s how those memories became a story:

• Wave Watcher begins with, “My younger brother was born with an enlarged heart and only one lung. Nana says God was so busy building him the perfect heart that he forgot to give him a second lung. The doctors labeled it a rare birth defect and said that only one in a hundred thousand children born with it lived past infancy. Dad didn’t think it was a big deal.”

• A few paragraphs later, I write, “Louie had only begun to walk when he chopped off most of his index finger and part of the middle one on his right hand. The doctors suggested prosthetic fingers. Mom disagreed; she said he would just have to learn how to be left-handed. Dad said that it wasn’t such a bad thing because it’s really the thumbs that matter.”

• Towards the middle of the chapter I write, “However, I did feel really bad about Louie losing the top third of his left ear. This happened just about the time that having an eight fingered kid in the family lost its novelty. The ear incident was the final straw. After that, people stopped worrying about Louie’s health all together. Dad says the ear accident was a blessing in disguise. He said, ‘It made Louie normal.’”

• And I end the chapter with, “The part of the story Louie has always like best, and the part we’ve always had to let him tell, is the end. By the time Dad and I got back to the house, my grandparent’s Chihuahua, Cricket, had gnawed around the soft edges of the missing piece of Louie’s ear. Louie always thought saying, ‘A Chihuahua named Cricket ate my ear,’ was funny. I guess it sort of is.”

 

As writers live and try to write, our memories long to become stories. They want us to move beyond what happened to what seemed to happen.  And so we do. We work with skewed angles of vision. We let our pictures get jumbled. And then, suddenly and most beautifully, our true stories, now untrue memories, end up representing the hard and exact truth as it seemed; and, more importantly, as it should be.

 

Dostoyevky ends his quote (the one I used to begin this piece), with, “If one has only one good memory left in one’s heart even that may sometimes be the means of saving us.” His prophetic words have always rung true to me; and, therefore, I know—like all writers with heads full of memories morphing into stories—that I am saved.