Memory Keeper

Late on a Wednesday evening, past time for bed on a choir night, I went around the first floor finding things I could dispose of or put away quickly—a probably futile attempt to render the mess less intimidating when I set out to clean for real the next day. I flipped shut the scrapbook on the living room floor and then paused, seeing a page lying off to the side. Now, pages routinely lie off to the side; the down side of using strap hinge albums is that occasionally the staples that keep the page in the album pull out. But this was a new page, one I’d never seen lying free. “Oh, no!” I said. “They pulled another one out!”

I stood there for a moment, debating whether I should declare the books off-limits altogether. It’s a morning ritual for the little ones to point, grunting, at the shelf, but it always spirals downward into bickering over who gets to look at which album. It’s a truism of early childhood that they always want the one their sibling has.

But even as the thought flitted across my brain, I knew I wouldn’t take the books away. After all, this is why I spend the time scrapbooking. And editing home videos, for that matter: so that we all can keep those memories fresh. Alex claims to remember things he couldn’t possibly remember. What he remembers is a home video or a scrapbook page of the moment. But you know, at times that’s indistinguishable from true memory.

That can be a bad thing; savoring the memory of how it felt or smelled or how things looked off-camera is what makes a memory real, and it’s tragic to reduce life to a series of snapshots.

But on the other hand, I learned something at a Down syndrome conference two weekends ago: my daughter is a visual learner, and always will be. She knows which book has the picture of the carousel in it, and every time she looks through the book, she turns to that page, then climbs to her feet and comes over to wave for my attention and gesture back at it. She wants me to have no doubt of her enthusiasm for the horsies. She recognizes the route we take to church, and the Mall as well, where the carousel resides, and oh, you should hear the excitement when she realizes where we’re headed.

I realize that those snapshots are part of the reason my kids recognize grandparents and, more importantly (because we see them less often), great grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins—and sometimes places, too. It gives them a tangible proof of their history, a sense of being part of something safe, something good.

I suppose a few detached scrapbook pages are a small price to pay, for that.