Breaks in memory

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

It was one of those mornings when you wake up way too early for some reason, and lay there thinking about things that you never have time to think about when everyone else is awake and there are too many things to do. 

As seems to be my habit when this happens, I embarked on a kind of time travel, ruminating about how old I was when my parents are the age I am now (two weeks shy of 45), then calculating all kinds of other bizarre autobiographical-mathematical formulae: 30 years ago I was 15, which doesn’t seem that long ago; but, when I was 15, “30 years ago” was 1965, when my parents were 9. In 30 years I’ll be 75 and they’ll be 99.

That kind of thing.

I thought of another one: 40 years ago, when I was 5, I fell off a piece of playground equipment and broke my right arm. It was a terrible break that had to be set and reset, the doctor essentially breaking my arm over and over again just to get it back into line. 

Because of the trauma of that experience, I can instantly reenter that kid’s world through the keyhole of the broken arm — the texture of the cast on his arm becomes a waypoint for remembering the long, golden strands of the carpet at his house and what was on TV while he lay on the couch recovering. 

It’s as if the reality of a broken bone grounded everything else in memories that, even 40 years later, often feel as vivid as whatever happened 10 or even five years ago.

What does all this have to do with anything? I broke my toe the other day while jumping on a trampoline (stupid). Hobbling around in my house with a cane given to me by Reader Publisher Ben Olson from his grandfather’s collection — and unable to climb the stairs to the Reader office — it has made me more philosophical than normal. 

I’ve been thinking about how the trauma of breakage influences memory. A lot of times, people say that they’ve “blocked out” some terrible or profound incident, but I find that moments of extremis or monumentality tend to stick out, rather than fade away. Ask folks of a certain age, and they can tell you where they were on the day of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination or the moon landing. 

It’s the same for those who were around for the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, whose 24th anniversary lands on the publication day for this week’s Reader. Of course, I remember where I was, and have written about it before — beginning with an article in this paper marking the fifth anniversary of the attacks.

9/11 was a traumatic breakage unlike any other ever experienced by the United States, and one from which we have not healed. It’s safe to say that we as a people we have followed the injunction, “Never forget,” at least in this instance, but it remains a raw fracture. 

I also remember where I was during the bombing of Baghdad, when President George W. Bush declared “mission accomplished” even as the “mission” was more than a decade from being “accomplished,” when Saddam Hussein was hanged and Osama bin Laden shot by Navy SEALs.

I’ll always remember where I was on the night of Barack Obama’s election as the first Black president of the United States and, with equal and opposite emotion, the election of Donald Trump as the first openly fascist president of the United States.

The storming of the Capitol by Trumpian insurrectionists on Jan. 6, 2021 and Trump’s disastrous reelection in 2024 will live in my memory as moments of both terrible and profound traumatic breakage.

I’m sure that in 30 years — when I’m 75 and my parents are 99, and I’m laying in bed on some predawn day time traveling to when I was 45 — I’ll remember my broken toe, and with it will come rushing back all the breakages we’re suffering in our body politic today. 

We might remember all these things, but we seem to have a hard time learning from them — breaking and rebreaking, never figuring out how to avoid these self-inflicted wounds. That said, you can be sure I’ll never forget that trampolines are meant for kids.