Weird.
I remember hearing a story a few years back (I think I’m getting old since a few years back was actually over 10 now that I think about it) where Ray Davies from the Kinks was in a small New York Club, listening to a punk trio blaze through their set.
There was one song in particular that seemed to tickle the ear of Mr. Davies. He found himself tapping his feet, bouncing his head and humming along at the club. The beat stayed with him and Ray found himself bopping his head to the same tune as he sang in the shower the following morning.
It wasn’t until two days later when the “Well Respected Man” finally realized that the song in his head was something he’d written some 20 years earlier.
I remember hearing that story and being filled with disbelief. “That’s impossible!” I thought,”how could anyone be so disconnected from their art?”
I had similar feelings when I read Stephen King’s on Writing and he talked about how he couldn’t remember writing a single page of Cujo. At least he offered an explanation. Seems at the time old Uncle Stevie was self medicating with about 87 different kinds of mostly illegal pharmaceuticals.
Still, how can you create something, be deeply committed to it in the moment, then barely remember it a couple of decades removed? Maybe that’s the way it was for other people, I thought, but surely not for me.
I was wrong.
I’ve been preparing something special lately. A present I’d like to give to the Writer Dad audience. No big deal really, I’ve just gathered a few reader favorites from the last year and a half. Those stories which have generated the most response, either in comments or emails received.
The weird thing was that as I was reading some of the posts, I had barely any memory of them. These were deep, intimate moments as I wrote them. Some even made me cry and yet the memory on the reread was distant enough to make me seriously wonder how well I would remember them 20 years later.
Phrases used, feelings captured, the way I once used a semi-colon; a nickname for my wife abandoned. Moments in time captured before they shifted, now forever frozen like a ship in a bottle.
Written or not, our human moments are soft, and subject to fading memory as the sun will bleach the ink in a photograph.
I’ve never been more appreciative of the man moments captured on the page.
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