BY JOELLEN COLLINS
I recently attended the MANHATTAN SHORT Film Festival here in Ketchum and thoroughly enjoyed the panoply of 10 movies during the two-hour event. It featured a vast variety of themes, techniques, and actors to create a highly entertaining couple of hours stimulating laughter, fear, and empathy — emotions universal but not always manifested from familiar sources.
One of the delights was a selection from Switzerland, “The Record.” It was a work of fine art, an animated depiction of a musical-instrument dealer who has discovered a “magic” record. When the needle is placed on the vinyl, the listener’s mind is read and the player presents lost memories, both good and bad.
I love the idea, though I think as one ages some “lost memories” pop in more frequently from one’s early, sharper memory days. I know that with technical innovations, people can assemble favorite songs or musical renditions that signify important memories and recreate special moments in life. Technology has made accessing these pieces easy and keeping them to enjoy whenever one wishes.
In my case, my more aged memory almost always connects a lyric with a memory that arises instantly with the first notes of a piece of music. I certainly think about my teenaged days when I hear any early rock-and-roll piece, remember the thrill when my love played “Beautiful, Beautiful Brown Eyes” while telling me that he imagined it written about my chocolate-colored orbs. One time, on a long drive, we could not find our destination, and, at the same moment, both of us started singing, “There’s a place for us, somewhere a place for us” from “West Side Story.” After pulling over to stop and laugh about this surprising exhibition of our inner musical memories, we commented that our brains were recalling the same emotions from the music our generation had shared. It might be hard for us to instantly combine rap music lyrics from a different era.
Occasionally, I am surprised by not remembering the title or lyrics of a current song which I may have heard just a couple of days before, but “Mairzy Doats” (“mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy”), a silly childhood jingle, pops into my mind during some silly chores I dislike, or “You’ve got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive/E-lim-i-nate the negative/Latch on to the affirmative/Don’t mess with Mr. In-Between” were words often sung around me when I was a cranky little girl. This must have been a recurring lyric in my early life, and it’s still stuck inside me.
It is true that, when we age, our brains tend to recall more clearly memories of earlier life experiences rather than recent ones. Whether we simply had fresher minds to store those memories then, or, as elders, we have no more room for this kind of information, many people experience flawed short-term memory as they age. I guess we just have to “accentuate” the happy moments we recall, whenever they show up.