the energy of memory
work in process//20.
[So sorry for the radio silence last week; I’ve been out and about on book tour + other adventures….see below!]
Last week I got a message on Instagram from a guy named Tom, who told me that he and his wife were fans of my books. I love getting reader notes, but this one caught my eye for a different reason. “I was on a bicycle trip with you in Europe in 1989,” Tom explained. He was coming to Santa Fe to see a relative; did I have time to grab a coffee?
I didn’t recognize his name, but I replied right away: Yes! For reasons I don’t entirely understand, I’d been thinking about the bike trip a lot in recent months, but I’d long ago lost touch with all of my trip-mates. Hearing from Tom was a flash of serendipity I couldn’t resist.
On the way to the coffee shop on Monday morning, I wondered if I would remember him. I wondered if I would have to hug him. I decided I did not want to; except for a month we’d spent together biking around Europe, he was a total stranger. For a split second, I debated texting my husband, Steve, to tell him my whereabouts in case I was never heard from again.
When I got there, I saw a guy sitting on the patio, whose face I didn’t recognize but whose manner I did, immediately, even from thirty feet away. Tom was holding out his arms for a hug and it felt entirely natural to hug him back, and if I had passed him on the street, I wouldn’t have known him, but there at the coffee shop it was—and I know this such a cliche—as though no time had passed.
There was no awkward small talk, no how-old-are-your-kids filler. We started reminiscing right away. The trip began in Munich, at the Hofbrauhaus. I remember the enormous steins of beer, but not much else. Tom had gotten separated from the group in Austria, did I remember? No, I did not. Did he recall a nightclub in Zermatt? No. But the Pink Floyd concert in Venice, on a floating barge, the narrow cobbled streets mobbed by crowds—that was etched permanently into both of our brains. We were on the Champs Elysees the day that Greg LeMond won the Tour de France. We were like Forrest Gump, there for all the action. We jumped into a fountain. We went to Auschwitz. Tom remembered the sign. We biked overnight from Paris to London in a driving rain. The group of us were together for a month and then gone almost completely from each others’ lives.
Would I have remembered these flashes on my own? Perhaps. But sitting with Tom, unearthing fragments of the long-ago trip, my memories came flooding back, doubled, mixing with Tom’s. Ironically, this is the one adventure of which I have no written record; any diary or journal, if I kept one, is long gone. So where do the memories live, if not on paper, in the written record? Deep in the recesses of our minds, yes, but also in our bodies—our cells and senses, muscles, limbs, and heart.
Memories are energy.
A few days later, I went to Portland on book tour. I was tired from traveling and half-wanted to stay home, but I knew—and not just from seeing Tom—that every time we go out into the world, we gather material. We layer more memories atop the old ones. We make new friends and run into old ones by chance. We meet the energy coming toward us with our own, and it grows exponentially. In this way, we begin writing new stories. Every experience shifts our energy energy, expands it, opening us to the brief flashings in the phenomenal world.
In Portland, I went out to dinner with my high-school friend Sara. I’d seen her five years ago, on my last book tour, in the same hotel lobby. The years between visits dissolved. We had dinner and drove around, reminiscing. Sitting shotgun in Sara's car, listening to her familiar voice I hadn’t heard in half a decade, our shared past came back. Did I remember the acronym we’d given to our group of friends in junior year physics? I had not thought of it in years, but out of nowhere, it was on my lips: “VUL?”I asked. Not even one minute before would I have remembered we’d had a group, let alone a name for it, but there it was, surfacing from depths. I could see the tall, black physics table where we sat at stools, it smooth shiny surface. “Victims of unrequited love!” I cried, and we burst out laughing.
In a way, writing this post makes me feel old. You have to have lived for a while to have so many forgotten memories. But then again, reliving them makes me feel young. I remember being 17, wearing my red Bell bike helmet that rode back on my forehead and was basically, as Tom and I joked, a couple of pieces of floppy styrofoam with a net on top. I remember so vividly the freedom and possibility of everything still being before me, unknown. I can practically taste it.
Memories are living things, constantly changing form, fading, reemerging, disappearing again. They don’t exist in a vacuum but rather shift and morph in conversation with our lives—time and place and people we’re with. They’re a collaboration with those we once briefly knew and meet again in a cafe after 35 years.
When I got home from the coffee shop, I went looking for my photo album from our 1989 trip. I hadn’t laid eyes on it in decades; had I even made one? I rummaged through cabinets. There beneath a pile of wedding albums and baby albums were the pictures from 1989, poor-quality snapshots of long-forgotten faces, bicycles strewn about, huge grins.
Tom came over that night to look at the pictures. We sat side by side on the couch, flipping through pages. He remembered so many more names than I did, but once we started, our memories multiplied. We’d seen so much that summer, and changed even more in the many years since. So has the world. Even then, 1989 felt freighted with significance, the end of something—a decade, our childhood, a truly analog world—and the beginning of something more complicated: real life.
When you’re 17, a month feels like a year, strangers feel like immediate best friends, and the bonds you forge over bicycles and stupidly big steins of beer (sorry Mom) seem destined to last a lifetime. But then life happens, time speeds up, years widen. Where had the rest of us gone?
Before Tom left, we remembered to have Steve take our picture. No one makes photo albums anymore, so this will live in our memories and the cloud until the next time we meet. In the meantime, Tom—who’s also a journalist—and I are looking for our other trip-mates. Who knows what will come to light when the energy of our memories multiplies even more?
If you were on the Europe bike trip with Tom and me in 1989, please message me here!
xo be the flashings,
katie
i’ve wrapped up my Brief Flashings book tour, save for a bikepacking book-tour leg I’ll be doing in Vermont later in June. Dates and details are still being sorted. My hope is for some combo loop feat. Craftsbury, Burlington, Middlebury, Norwich. Reach out if you have a home bookstore, run club, riding group, or book club that’s interested in hosting an event.
I’ve got my book, circa 1990, for reference….:)
1989 was amazing—the fall of the Berlin Wall! I was a senior in college then. It's always special to reconnect with people from high school and college years.