Misty Watercolor Memories

My February Intrigue, Circumstantial Memories, is about a woman who has amnesia. Her past holds dangerous secrets she’s better off forgetting, but she doesn’t even remember the father of her child. When he shows up in town after three years, it exposes the heroine to all kinds of difficulties…and lots of hot passion!

I had fun writing this book because memory is so very interesting! I generally have a good memory, but as I get older I definitely have been drawing more “blanks” than I used to. I think people have good recall for different things. My husband will claim that I have a great memory when it comes to dumb or embarrassing things he’s done in the past. My husband can remember cases he’s worked on in minute detail but then he forgets the names of our sons’ friends’ parents and even their teachers sometimes!

I don’t remember a whole lot about my early childhood, but certain memories stand out for me. One of those is sitting in the backseat of the car eating a brownie with my mom driving. I must have been four at the oldest because I remember we had already dropped my three older siblings off at school. I don’t know why I’ve kept that particular memory in my brain. I have a few memories from kindergarten – one of a boy I had a crush on. His name was Mark and he wore earmuffs to school sometimes. This is unusual since I grew up in northern California and earmuffs were not a common accessory. I never even owned a pair of earmuffs! Maybe that’s why I remember Mark (or maybe that’s why I had a crush on him). For about ten years after I went to Greece, I could reel off the names of the islands, in order, that I visited. I just realized a few years ago I couldn’t do that anymore. It was a weird feeling. I thought I’d never forget the details of that trip! Memory is an odd thing.

When my boys were little – maybe four or five – I tried to find out if they could remember anything about being born. Is that weird of me? I mean, at ten years old you can usually remember events from five years before, right? No luck. They couldn’t seem to remember things from the previous two weeks! And now at 11 and 12, they don’t remember people and places from kindergarten that I can easily recall.

My father-in-law died at age 87 last year. Toward the end, he couldn’t remember our kids’ names or what he did the week before. But he fought in WWII and was present at D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, and he could still remember people and situations from that time. The short-term memories were fading, but the long-term were still hanging in there.

One of the most interesting movies I ever saw about memory was Memento. It’s about a man, played by Guy Pearce, who has short-term memory loss (over and over), and he’s trying to find out how his wife died. It’s really confusing but in a good way. One of my favorite “amnesia” movies is Dead Again with Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson (when they were together). I love that movie!

Why are we drawn to amnesia stories? Why are we fascinated by people who have lost their memories? Perhaps it’s because memories are who we are on the deepest level. I have a good friend and an ex-boyfriend who have passed away. Sometimes I think about the situations that involved just the two of us, and I realize that I’m the only one who holds that memory now. That memory can be anything I want it to be. I can impose any spin or interpretation on that memory and nobody else can refute it now. I own that memory all by myself. So, hey, it becomes a circumstantial memory, doesn’t it?

So what are some of your earliest memories or some of your favorite amnesia books or movies? Have you ever had some weird memory incidents? And now that I'm thinking about it, I need to go back to my photo albums from Greece and retrace that trip in my and put those memories back in my brain!

Carol Ericson
Where Romance Flirts With Danger