Austin's memory is amazing. For a while, he would be be reminded of various things; we'd be playing with the Fisher Price farm and he'd say, Remember we went to the farm and saw sheep?
But then today he was playing with his spoon (we had Matzo ball soup for dinner, a new favorite). He stood the spoon on one end and said, "Remember we saw a sculpture like this? In Toronto?" Before I could even think of what he was talking about he corrected himself, "No, in New York." We think he's referring to the sculpture of a man standing on another man's shoulders that sits on the bridge between Columbia's main campus and the law school.
Oh, and about two weeks ago, we were driving and he was in the backseat zoning out as usual--except he suddenly said, "Remember we had dinner with Yang yeh yeh?" It was so out of the blue that I wasn't sure he knew what he was talking about (the last time we saw Bob Yang, my godfather, was more than a month earlier). I remember we had dinner, I said, what did we eat? Hamburgers? "No!" Austin said, "Chinese food!"
The memory is a weird thing and it's odd to watch it develop.
1 comment:
I've often been amazed, caught off guard and/or personally humbled by the depth and breadth of my kids' memory. Nothing like having your child regale your guests with an obscure and accurate recollection of the time you stepped in something really smelly, for instance, to make your dinner parties extra special.
I've since hypothesized that kids have sharper memories because (a) so many things are novel and fresh experiences for them, and (b) the stream of stuff we have to absorb as adults whitewashes over our other memories.
In my case, this means my memory of "that trip to the hardware store when we saw the baby chicks" is being erased by "Share of the Wireless Email Devices Market, By Carrier", which is a goddamn shame.
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