Found Memories
Winter finally released its grip from Chicago this week, giving me the occassion to peel the fleece lining out of my heavy coat to convert it into a spring jacket. This uncovered a hidden pocket inside the lapel of the outer shell, inside which I found the remains of the ticket stub from a Chicago Cubs game against the Milwaukee Brewers at Wrigley Field on April 29, 2006. It was torn in four places: one, along the perforated line that the ushers rip when you enter the ballpark, and three less exact gashes through the top half that looked like they were caused by absent-minded handling or the trauma of several spin cycles.
It was a Saturday afternoon game, and a real circus apparently. The Brewers won 16-2 on the strength of six home runs, including two from their stout first baseman, Prince Fielder. A memorable game, to judge by the box score, except I don’t remember a thing about it. As a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals, the Cubs’ biggest rival, I certainly would have enjoyed the spectacle of the Brewers running up the score. In my mind, I can recreate the crowd’s reaction after each home run, the boos and the catcalls after the Cubs’ starting pitcher Glendon Rusch was pulled in the third inning. But it’s all conjecture, pieced together from other experiences at Wrigley Field that I do recall.
There was a time in my life where such a lapse in memory could have been easily explained, when a Saturday afternoon at the ballpark would have meant drinking so much beer that I blacked out and couldn’t remember the train ride home, let alone specifics of the game. But I know for a fact that I wasn’t drinking that day, because in April of 2006 I was trying to mend my ways and hadn’t taken a drink in over a month. The irresponsibility of hanging on to youth for too long couldn’t explain this omission.
Since I found the ticket stub in that secret pocket, it suggests that I also wore my jacket that day in its current configuration for a typical Chicago April: not too cold, but none too warm either. Maybe that’s it. The weather was unremarkable. I didn’t freeze, as so often happens during the early season at Wrigley when the cold winds blow in from Lake Michigan, nor did I bask in the sunshine and gawk at the young women who flock to Cubs games to flirt with the young (and like the erstwhile author, drunk) men.
But bland weather can’t explain forgetting such an impressive offensive show either, one that surely would have appealed to my sense of schadenfreude toward the Cubs. I’ve been to hundreds of games, and I accept that some of them may have blended together. But I’m a baseball fan, obesessive and statistically-minded by definition. I remember that Andy Van Slyke hit a home run and Bruce Sutter got the save against the Dodgers in the first Cardinals game I ever attended in 1984. I remember seeing Bo Jackson hit a ball 420 feet to centerfield against the Yankees in Kansas City in 1990. I should remember 16 runs on 16 hits and six home runs from three years ago. This is troubling.
When my son was about three years old, I found a forgotten disposable camera in the bottom of his diaper bag. The roll of film was spent, and not knowing what images it held, I developed it for fun. The resulting pictures were bad–grainy, fingertips in the frame, out of focus. Some of them looked like my son had taken them himself. But upon seeing them, I remembered the scenes they showed instantly: a night at my in-laws’ cabin in Michigan, a weekday lunch at the Goose Island Brewery. These memories weren’t at the forefront of my mind, but the appearance of a token that had also been there, those grainy snapshots from goofing around with a cheap camera, made them fresh again.
I once found an SD memory card, one of those postage stamp-sized chips used in digital cameras, on the sidewalk near my house. I picked it up out of sheer curiosity, figuring that if it was in good shape I could reformat it and use it myself. I put it in my computer to browse the contents, and found it filled with someone else’s photos–vacation photos, judging by the scenery, from somewhere in Europe. A young couple smiled at me over glasses of wine at dinner. The woman posed by an entrance to a ruined, brown castle. The man put his arm around her in front of a long shot of a narrow, medieval street. Based on my own travels, I could reconstruct the scenes in the photos and hear the castle tour guide’s stilted, received pronunication. I could feel the heavy Euro coins in my pocket as I fished for a tip for the waiter. But those memories weren’t mine, they were those of the mystery people in the photos. I took the memory card out of my comptuer, feeling guilty that I had snooped on their vacation.
The next day, I taped a couple flyers with my cell phone number to the light poles along the sidewalk where I found the card, promising its safe return. Whoever those people were in the photos, touring castles and enjoying their wine, surely would want it back, not for the value of the cheap memory card, but for the actual memories it held. Maybe they’d been visiting friends in my neighborhood and realized they’d dropped it on that very sidewalk. They’d be so thankful I thought to rescue it for them.
But I never got a call, and took the flyers down after a week. Maybe they didn’t realize the card was lost until too late, when they’d been too many places in between to narrow it down to one particular spot in all of Chicago. Or maybe they had already copied the photos to a hard drive, and my good deed was all for naught. But what if they did lose those pictures for good, stuck on the memory card where I tossed it into a box of other comptuer detritus? I didn’t have the heart to delete the photos and reuse the card. They weren’t mine to delete. Do the memories of their trip fade without those visual reminders, the same way my memories of that rowdy day at Wrigley Field disappeared too?
I should hope not. I prefer to think that baseball game has decayed into the hieroglyphics of a box score because of the banality of one more baseball game among the hundreds of others I’ve witnessed, no matter how many runs were scored. Surely, those travelers could relive that trip in their mind’s eye, with or without pictures. But for those everyday images–the grin on my son’s face as he contemplated a plate of french fries, or the way my dog’s tongue hung out as he stared into the camera at the cabin–I’m glad for that disposable camera and the pleasure of discovering memories once lost.