Replaying a moment, and cassette tapes from July 14, 1987

When I was a child, we had to have a TV guide because the only way you could watch programs that you wanted to see was to be in front of the set at the moment it aired. VCRs either didn't exist or were only used in professional settings. It wasn't until I entered junior high school that they became commercially available, and my family was too poor to buy one until I was in college. Experiences  were transitory. You had them for the present time, but they could be replayed only as imperfect memory.

The idea that you could record and replay anything, let alone special moments in your life, was not something anyone expected. Cell phones with cameras weren't resting in every hand. The best you could hope for was that a wandering photographer at an event may have caught something important and offered you a print. This is why so many events, such as weddings or proms, only involved highly staged photos that captured the fact of the experience, but none of the quality of it.

Even though we presently live in a time in which people are constantly recording their lives, it's still serendipity if a spontaneous, precious experience is recorded. The first time someone tells you they love you, your first hug, or your first kiss are unlikely to be in a replayable format. One of the handful of benefits of a distance relationship back in the pre-internet age was that it was all written or recorded. I could put in a tape and hear Tito say over and over and over again that he had strong feelings for me. And, I did.

The two tapes I'm picturing  here were labeled physically by Tito, but I called them "Wow" and "Oh, Wow" and I listened to them more than a dozen times. Hearing them was the best moment of my existence and I could repeat it as many times as I wanted. This was a rare gift of our circumstances.

Memory, and a July 22, 1987 greeting card

One of my friends remarked to me that he felt bad about how little of his childhood he recollected based on how much of mine I remembered. While it is true that I have a lot of memories that are quite clear and well-developed, and my sister confirms the ones that are shaky, a big part of how much I remember comes down to three things.

One is that I reinforced those memories by writing them down a long time ago, often multiple times. I had about 20 pen pals by the time I was 17 and I didn't have a kaleidoscope of experiences to relate to them on a regular basis. It wasn't uncommon for me to relate the same stories again and again to people.

I believe the second reason was that I grew up in an era with far less media saturation so I was less distracted and more engaged with my world, troubling and troublesome as it could be. I wasn't spending my days distracted by Netflix, surfing the web, or playing video games. The norm for me was being present in the world and observing closely. When you live in a state of hypervigilance, this is necessary, not just a product of curiosity.

The final reason is that I'm a very emotional person and the feelings you have at the moment a memory is formed are encoded with the details of an experience in your brain. Strong emotions and detailed memories stick out like mountains in the memory. People who aren't present live life in a blur because they're not reacting. The memories are plains of indifference.

All of that being said, without my enormous stash of correspondence from the time of my long distance relationship, I wouldn't have the details required to write my book with any sense of accuracy. It comforts me to have such granularity to my story because I value truth and complexity. Many of my cards and letters to Tito were about detailing my history and reactions in a way which I wouldn't otherwise recall in such detail.