Here’s an end-of-2024 quiz: What did you do on April 21? What did you eat for dinner on Oct. 2? Can you name a top headline from Aug. 15?
If you’ve got nothing, I feel you.
Which brings me to the actress Marilu Henner, who famously has a rare condition that grants her incredible autobiographical memory. When I had the chance to meet Ms. Henner last December, she asked for my birth date. “That was a Friday,” she said. “‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ had just been released. And oh, I tried a dessert called the Junkyard with friends in upstate New York.”
It was astonishing, though it also brought a strange grief for all the moments from my life I could not remember with any specificity. How much did I truly recall from the hectic blur of my former career as a women’s magazine editor, during which there’d been any number of outlandish moments? What about all the friends from high school and college I’d since lost touch with? Shouldn’t I possess more memories of my late father, who’d worked as a cross-country truck driver and took me on road trips when I was a child? What did we talk about over those thousands of miles? Where did we go?
The realization that I pay money to back up my devices but invest nothing to make sure such valuable remnants from my life are preserved prompted me to search for tips on improving my memory. The suggestions — get plenty of sleep, eat veggies, do logic puzzles — seemed like decent advice. But all the zzz’s, leafy greens and Wordle in the world were never going to catapult me into Ms. Henner’s that-was-the-day-I-tried-Rollerblading-for-the-first-time-and-Howard-Dean-dropped-out-of-the-Democratic-primary league of memory champs.
Then it occurred to me that if I really did want to remember a few gems about each passing day, why not simply write them down? As a novelist who compulsively revises even the most basic sentences, I worried that a diary would suck hours from each day. But I thought of my sister, Keri, who used to keep a wall calendar stashed under her bed when we were kids. Each night, she’d scratch down one word to sum things up: Cheerleading! Mall! Party!
My daily record of adulthood was bound to sound a lot less fun, but I decided to attempt something similar. My ground rules: 1. Keep it brief. 2. No revising. 3. No looking back until the end of the year, since that risked my breaking rule No. 2.
On Jan. 1, 2024, I opened a file on my laptop and typed about the day with my husband: “Woke at the Hillbrook Inn in West VA… After breakfastt, Thomas and I had the most beautiful drive thru the Blue Ridge Mountains….it was snowing.” (Yes, I saw that pesky typo but resisted fixing it and pressed onward.) On Jan. 28: “After a month away, we drove home to NYC. Within an hour of the city, I asked Thomas what he remembered about moving there in his 20’s. He told me about arriving at Port Authority with his mom’s gargantuan Samsonite suitcase and hauling it across town to his friend’s place on the Eastside. As he was telling the story, the lights of Manhattan appeared in the distance, like the city was welcoming us all over again.”
True to my vow, I only recently looked back at the things I’d written. What I found: a bounty of such sweet moments. Sad ones, too. On March 31: “Easter. We were out for a walk when Keri texted that our mom was found on floor by her bed, breathing sporadically.” After the I.C.U. doctors identified what turned out to be urosepsis, a life-threatening medical emergency, I spent nights in a chair by her bed. On April 11: “My mom and I left the hospital today. Finally. Think she was kind of stunned as we drove home thru the rainy streets. I kept teasing her we were going dancing. I made her chicken piccata. We toasted to Cristian.” (Cristian is my nephew and her grandson, then 13, who found her and got help.) “She was happy to sleep in her own bed.”
For more than 100 pages, this poorly punctuated daily record is full of moments that had already begun to fade, and many that I’d forgotten, until the simple string of words brought them back to life.
There was a spring day I attended the wedding of a friend at City Hall in Lower Manhattan. “Arrived first, waited outside in the sun and gusting wind, watching the brides come and go, looking so beautiful.” There was a weekend when our niece was having a “guac off” with her freshmen dorm mates and asked for our guacamole recipe, texting us afterward, “GUYS I WON!!!” There were so many mornings when I “woke early to work” until the late autumn afternoon when I “typed the last sentence of my new novel!”
Of course, people have been keeping diaries for centuries, though I suspect that less of us do now. A survey of more than a dozen friends turned up only one who sporadically made an attempt. The rest rely on their phone’s photo roll or social media. However, with so many of us taking thousands of photos, I wonder if each picture is still really worth a thousand words? Given how much those images are curated and filtered, do they provide a faithful record of our lives?
Looking back, I found that the events I recalled as uniformly terrible had moments of beauty sewn in, like those nights in the hospital when my mother and I talked for hours in the dark as the machines beeped and nurses came in to check on her.
And now, should someone throw a random date at me, I’ll have an answer. Say it’s July 12, 2024. Pausing to check my notes won’t pack the same punch as Ms. Henner’s impressive skill, but I could reply: “That Friday, we took our niece and nephew fishing. When Cristian caught a fish, the captain of the boat grabbed a brand-new net that still had a price tag attached. In the excitement of scooping up the fish, the sticker got stuck to its fin. Confused, Cristian said, ‘Wait, why does the fish have a price tag?’ I told him, ‘Um, that was on the net. Fish don’t come out of the sea with price tags.’ We both burst out laughing.”
A trivial detail maybe, but to me it feels like a gift. On some future day, when I’m not laughing with my nephew on a fishing boat, or driving my weary mother home so she can sleep in her own bed, or standing outside City Hall watching young brides so joyful and full of life, I’ll have in my possession an express ticket back to those moments I lived.
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