Memory Journal

If blogging had been around in the 1930s, my tech-savvy grandmother-in-law would have been all over it.  We’d be able to go to her blog today and trace her life through her posts. It'd be the online equivalent of finding a dusty collection of journals in the attic. Too bad Al Gore didn't invent the internet until much later.


Fortunately for us, Ian’s Grandma participates in an online project called Elder Storytelling where she and other folks in their golden years share stories from their lives.  It’s like retrospective blogging, and it’s really fun. You should check it out here.
 

Reading her stories got me wondering: if we’re the grandparents of tomorrow, won’t we have a pretty extensive digital legacy for our grandkids to look back on and learn about our lives?   I know it’s hard to predict when technologies will be replaced with new ones, but I think it’s safe to say that the Internet will be around for a long time.  So won’t our facebook pages, our web albums, and our blogs be around for everyone to see...maybe forever?
  

I started this blog - and the Dinnertime Stories chapter in particular - to tell my own stories and create my own digital legacy to share with you and perhaps my successors.  (Shout out to any great-great-great-grandkids reading this in the 23rd century!)  I can only hope that our future robot overlords will keep my pretty wallpaper and curly font on this blog when they archive it. For now, I'm happy it's just you and me here... 

To start off my Memory Journal, let me share my first two memories with you.   

• This one’s sad.  I must not be older than three years old, and I’m at my dad’s Uncle's funeral.  I have something in my mouth - maybe a pacifier - and my Polkadot Blankie dangling heavily over my shoulder.  I’m standing in front of a large dark box, the smooth wood just above my eye level.  I’m too short to see inside it, but I look up and over my left shoulder see the grown-ups behind me crying. Adults crying is new to me.  I don’t understand why they’re sad. 
• Onto the happy one.  I’m in the bathtub upstairs.  My parents just bought me the most beautiful purple innertube for me to play with at the pool.  It’s shaped like a dragon, and Daddy has inflated it to life.  Maybe the weather is too cold or it’s not even summer yet, but I can’t wait to take it the pool, so I swim with it in the bathtub.  Just me and the inflatable plastic dragon wrapped around my tummy, both of us splashing back and forth between the gray bath tiles.  My parents stand by the mirror, arms around each other waists, smiling at me playing in the water.  

I’ve heard that the older the memory, the more likely you are to see the experience as an observer, as if you’re floating above the scene.  For these two, I still see them from my own eyes.