Years ago, my mom told me that memory is fiction. That each time we remember something, the memory is rewritten. It’s possible that she told me this in self defense, as explanation for her exaggerated stories, which are often altered within the hour of an occurrence. She likes to tell the one about the motel room. 

It was July, and we were making our way to our cousin’s house in Spokane. My mom admits that we should have stopped earlier. Motel offerings were slim by 1 am, when we slowed to a stop off the rural Washington highway. 

As she likes to tell it, my mom walked the four of us daughters along the second floor balcony to our room. Walking in front of us was another motel guest, recently returned from a late night run to the liquor store. He had his hands full, two 12-packs. Approaching his room, he glanced down at the beer, back at his door, and with a grunt of preparation, proceeded to headbutt the door open. 

My mom walked us into our room next door and quickly got to work rearranging the furniture. My sisters and I slept horizontally across the double bed; my feet dangled off. The desk, chair, and nightstand were all pushed up against the door. My mom spent the night in a sleeping bag, in front of her barricade. 

She spent many years believing that we would recall it differently. The room, rearranged for aesthetics. That we had felt safe. It might have been 11 pm, not 1 am; the motel guest had 30-racks in his hand; in one telling, he kicked open the door. But in recalling it to our adult ears, my mom finds that we felt her fear, also. 

I can remember relief, at piling back into the Suburban the next morning. I don’t remember the rest of the drive, but I remember that Spokane was hot, and I can still smell The Body Shop tea tree shampoo that we used in our cousin’s backyard shower. 

—

Memory means ‘the faculty of remembering’. I fear that we are losing this faculty; that my sisters’ and my collective memory of late, lacks substance. It is stamped with place and time, and meal and outfit, but in its documenting, have we lost something in it? 

In all of our recordings, I fear we might only remember what’s in the photographs. It feels like we’ve lost some power of familial observation. I don’t know why it happened. Our phones? Less togetherness? We’ve all been adults for years now, and there is less time to retell overheard conversations or mutually witness a new character in our lives. 

Still, when we fall back into togetherness, we tell what we have witnessed. Sometimes there are no photographs, there are only the stories. What do we believe, then?

—

My grandfather is getting older. We’ve been saying getting older for years now, so it must mean that my grandfather has grown old. He is a theoretical physicist. He has a list of over five hundred publications to his name, and his work has been cited over forty-thousand times. For seventy years, he calculated properties of superconductors.

I once watched him give a lecture at the Max Planck Institute. I was only twelve and I remember the overwhelming drowsiness I felt in the audience, sitting next to my grandmother. He doesn’t lecture anymore. He has begun to tell his stories on a loop, and we listen anyway. I like when he recalls the fluke which he believes fast-tracked him into Yale’s advanced Freshman chemistry. Or, maybe landed him at Yale altogether. 

He took the college admissions test near Scarsdale, New York, where he went to high school with my grandmother. My grandfather had been told that the test subtracted points for questions left blank. Nerves wracked, and running out of time, he claims to have bubbled in the majority of his answers in a random pattern, simply for the sake of leaving no question unmarked. 

He received the highest test score at Scarsdale High that year. Upon placement in the Advanced chemistry class at Yale, he tried to talk his way out of it. His professor refused. “Oh no, Mr. Scalapino,” my grandfather likes to recall, “I know many students like you, the first semester is daunting, but you will be fine.”

He was fine, but he spent all of his hours studying chemistry. The teaching assistant began using his lab reports as the rubric to grade by. This went okay, mostly; though during the elemental analysis lab, his reaction turned black and viscous, and the rest of the students received sub-par assessments, for not having replicated his results. 

My grandfather begins again. “Now, I had been told that for this test, one was penalized for leaving answers blank.” He pauses, trying to locate his 17-year old self.  “And you can imagine, this made Pa very nervous.”

We go on, listening. 

—

Why am I telling you this? I suppose I am trying to locate the origins of memory. Mine, anyway. The ones in which I remember the feeling, not the photograph.

I can tell you where my memory begins. We lived on Mistral Ave, on Humbolt Island. It was in Huntington Beach and the island was man made, but still, when I was old enough to remember that I’d lived on an island, I found this to be an impressive fact. 

My mom swam lengths between the beach and the boat dock on the other side of the small harbor, she timed her laps in the number of minutes it took for my twin sisters to weasel from the middle of the picnic blanket to its edges, where they would consume sand by the fistful. They were six-months old at the time, and I had just celebrated my second birthday. 

I had a yellow swimsuit with a built-in tube for flotation. I would wade into the harbor with Mom, bobbing in the gentle current for the duration of her swim. I wish I could tell you that I remember the sensation of the cold harbor water, or the comfort of the warm bathtub routine that must have followed our outings. 

But truthfully, all that I can remember is bobbing in my yellow swimsuit, observing the space between the shore and the boat dock, and the feeling that maybe, if I egg-beatered fast enough, I would catch up to my mom, on the other side.