
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, March 24, 1990                   TAG: 9003262153
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

MATERIAL ALWAYS FRESH/ POOR MEMORY, REPEATED JOY

IF I NEVER bought another book, or never checked another one out of the library, I'd still never run out of books to read. That's because I can read the same book over and over, and not remember I've read it the first time.

I discovered this just Wednesday. I was getting along about halfway through a novel by an author I greatly admire - Wright Morris - and congratulating myself on finally getting read a book I'd bought in '76, when I came to three or four pages marked up with brackets and underlinings and exclamation points in the margins. Here were three or four pages I'd obviously read and admired before, three or four pages smack in the middle of a novel that, although I'd been savoring it right along, I hadn't recognized a single word or thought of it.

Now, I'm a pretty fair reader. I read a pretty fair amount, and I usually understand a fair amount of what I read. I even re-mark it as I read and think I'm going to remember it.

But, then, I like jokes, too, and you could tell me the very same joke seven times in one week and I'd laugh just as hard every time, because I wouldn't remember I'd ever heard it before. Oh, I might remember the punch line; but I'd remember it in a vacuum, without any of what it takes to make the punch line funny. I'm the very type of audience a good joke-teller likes. When he gets to the punch line, I might nod and recite it with him; but I'll laugh all the same, because it will strike me as funny. Again.

What I'm finally realizing is that you can't program your memory to remember anything just because you want it remembered. Your memory will remember only whatever it wants. And without rhyme or reason, at that. According to odd genetic patterns no one in your family recognizes.

I don't remember a single scene from Wright Morris' luminous novel, but if my husband stops suddenly in the parking lot, say, of a pizza parlor and tells me, "Name that black guy who plays on `Designing Women'," I'll be able to say "Meschah Taylor" without missing a beat.

The other weekend a childhood friend's father asked me if I remembered that skit his daughter and I played in, in which we lamented the plight of a donkey sitting down on a cactus. He remembers it well, and still chuckles whenever it's mentioned. His daughter remembers it, too. I have no memory at all of what they were talking about, but neither one of them would lie; so I must have been there.

But that's one of those slippery memories that's flitted away, just like the scenes from Morris' novel. I'm enjoying the book enormously this second time around. I probably enjoyed it the first time, as well. In 10 or 12 years, I'll likely pick it up again on a rainy afternoon and blithely read it a third time, wondering at myself all over again when I come to the pages I've marked.

by CNB