We’ve been hearing and seeing a lot about Brett Kavanaugh’s memory, and the memories—sometimes supporting, sometimes countervailing—of his male and female associates, friends, and former classmates. Is it reasonable to agree that memories of high school events from 35-36 years ago (or a bit more recent—as in college, at Yale), can be sketchy, hazy, incomplete, subject to interpretation, even wildly at odds with reality, etc.? Yes, it’s possible.
It’s possible when the events of the time are common, recurring, and banal, as when you walk across campus every day, or eat at the student union, or spend hours in the library, or participate in three or four classes a day for weeks on end. Picking some of those moments out of the fast-passing railcars of memories and declaring with absolute certainty that none of those moments was memorable is, I think we can all agree, reasonable.
But then there are those moments that simply cannot be “un-memorized or un-remembered,” their ever-tolling bells cannot be un-rung, their toothpaste-like texture impossible to push back into the far-reaches of the brain from which they ooze. This is true for women and for men. But I can only speak to what it is like to be a man with certain memories that will be forever memories, that will always be ringing, that will always extrude from the tube of my life’s events.
I’ve got a few years on Brett Kavanaugh…my high school and college days precede his by almost 20 years. My elementary school days happened in the 1950s and early 60s, long before Kavanaugh entered Georgetown Prep. And yet…and yet I have memories of events—some traumatic, some dumb-ass rites of passage, some just plain boneheaded, boorish, and stupid, and some which were hurtful to others—that I can pull out of the vast warehouse of file cabinets of my experiences as if they happened this morning.
I can describe the first time and place a girl kissed me—an innocent moment of heartfelt glee and childish innocence that was memorable for its spontaneity and honesty. I was nine. She was nine. It was 1958. We were playing in my room; she liked plastic model airplanes and I was building them. I had invited her by to see my work table in my room. Her name was Judy. I used to look at her from the front window of my school bus following her school bus, where she sat in the back and waved at me. Because I was an officer’s child, and she was not, she was disciplined for crossing a social line, and we rarely saw each other again. You don’t forget the unfair things that adults put on your life. And you don’t forget that soft kiss on your cheek, wrapped up in giggles and scented with model airplane glue.
You don’t forget when, at a boy’s school in Tennessee in 1961, you were held down by four upperclassmen, your shirt pulled up, water dripped on your stomach that was covered in sharp-edged grass, and then the boys took turns slapping your stomach until you bled from the grass cuts. You remember you were 12. You remember the helplessness and looking at the sky and the clouds, and trying hard to run out of your brain.
You remember playing in a rock band in 1967, in Georgetown, where beer flowed freely, and you got so drunk after one gig that your bandmates loaded you into a taxi which took you home to Arlington, after the taxi driver dug out your wallet to find your address. Buy you do remember that it happened, even though the details are 50-years old.
And you remember your freshman year in college in 1968, in a party-university on the Front Range of the Rockies, that your roommate was one of the biggest drug dealers on campus, and the dorm was filled with football players and other jocks who targeted a young girl named Mina because she was vulnerable and small. You remember with absolute clarity the sound and touch and smell in the late-night when your dorm room door opened and a shy but terrified Mina, without a word, slipped into your bed and fell fast asleep against you because, as she said before dropping off, “I know you won’t hurt me.”
I am a huge fan of the late Don Williams—a country singer whose heartfelt songs of love and loss and growing up and growing old cause the strings of my life to vibrate in bittersweet sympathy. The stanza of his song, “Some Broken Hearts Never Mend,” goes like this:
“Some broken hearts never mend
Some memories never end
Some tears will never dry”
Some memories never end. Some voices and smells and nature’s caresses are imprinted—burnished into the brain. The details you sometimes wish you could remember—or details you wish you could forget—rise and fall with life’s tide, like aging boats lashed to a pier of time. But the memories are always there, like the pilings supporting the pier itself, as it juts out into your past. Its planks may be slowly falling away while the boats become older and more weathered, but the memories of the journeys you took on those boats will remain after the last piling crumbles.
I believe Dr. Cynthia Blasey Ford remembers something that happened to her and that her memory is not a random thought or a willful political act that places Brett Kavanaugh in it. I believe Judge Kavanaugh is related to Dr. Ford’s memory; I believe he knows he is related to it, that he is an intimate and frightful part of it, but that, nonetheless, he is reluctant to walk out onto the pier that will force him to confront his own memory.
The now-underway FBI investigation is going to walk Judge Kavanaugh along the pier of his younger life, and whether he likes it or not—whether it tells us anything more than we saw and heard in Thursday’s hearing—it will cause him to examine a heretofore willfully-unexamined life and the lives he affected forever by his recklessness, ruthlessness, arrogance, and his total disdain for at least one young girl’s vulnerability.
But then there are those moments that simply cannot be “un-memorized or un-remembered,” their ever-tolling bells cannot be un-rung, their toothpaste-like texture impossible to push back into the far-reaches of the brain from which they ooze. This is true for women and for men. But I can only speak to what it is like to be a man with certain memories that will be forever memories, that will always be ringing, that will always extrude from the tube of my life’s events.
I’ve got a few years on Brett Kavanaugh…my high school and college days precede his by almost 20 years. My elementary school days happened in the 1950s and early 60s, long before Kavanaugh entered Georgetown Prep. And yet…and yet I have memories of events—some traumatic, some dumb-ass rites of passage, some just plain boneheaded, boorish, and stupid, and some which were hurtful to others—that I can pull out of the vast warehouse of file cabinets of my experiences as if they happened this morning.
I can describe the first time and place a girl kissed me—an innocent moment of heartfelt glee and childish innocence that was memorable for its spontaneity and honesty. I was nine. She was nine. It was 1958. We were playing in my room; she liked plastic model airplanes and I was building them. I had invited her by to see my work table in my room. Her name was Judy. I used to look at her from the front window of my school bus following her school bus, where she sat in the back and waved at me. Because I was an officer’s child, and she was not, she was disciplined for crossing a social line, and we rarely saw each other again. You don’t forget the unfair things that adults put on your life. And you don’t forget that soft kiss on your cheek, wrapped up in giggles and scented with model airplane glue.
You don’t forget when, at a boy’s school in Tennessee in 1961, you were held down by four upperclassmen, your shirt pulled up, water dripped on your stomach that was covered in sharp-edged grass, and then the boys took turns slapping your stomach until you bled from the grass cuts. You remember you were 12. You remember the helplessness and looking at the sky and the clouds, and trying hard to run out of your brain.
You remember playing in a rock band in 1967, in Georgetown, where beer flowed freely, and you got so drunk after one gig that your bandmates loaded you into a taxi which took you home to Arlington, after the taxi driver dug out your wallet to find your address. Buy you do remember that it happened, even though the details are 50-years old.
And you remember your freshman year in college in 1968, in a party-university on the Front Range of the Rockies, that your roommate was one of the biggest drug dealers on campus, and the dorm was filled with football players and other jocks who targeted a young girl named Mina because she was vulnerable and small. You remember with absolute clarity the sound and touch and smell in the late-night when your dorm room door opened and a shy but terrified Mina, without a word, slipped into your bed and fell fast asleep against you because, as she said before dropping off, “I know you won’t hurt me.”
I am a huge fan of the late Don Williams—a country singer whose heartfelt songs of love and loss and growing up and growing old cause the strings of my life to vibrate in bittersweet sympathy. The stanza of his song, “Some Broken Hearts Never Mend,” goes like this:
“Some broken hearts never mend
Some memories never end
Some tears will never dry”
Some memories never end. Some voices and smells and nature’s caresses are imprinted—burnished into the brain. The details you sometimes wish you could remember—or details you wish you could forget—rise and fall with life’s tide, like aging boats lashed to a pier of time. But the memories are always there, like the pilings supporting the pier itself, as it juts out into your past. Its planks may be slowly falling away while the boats become older and more weathered, but the memories of the journeys you took on those boats will remain after the last piling crumbles.
I believe Dr. Cynthia Blasey Ford remembers something that happened to her and that her memory is not a random thought or a willful political act that places Brett Kavanaugh in it. I believe Judge Kavanaugh is related to Dr. Ford’s memory; I believe he knows he is related to it, that he is an intimate and frightful part of it, but that, nonetheless, he is reluctant to walk out onto the pier that will force him to confront his own memory.
The now-underway FBI investigation is going to walk Judge Kavanaugh along the pier of his younger life, and whether he likes it or not—whether it tells us anything more than we saw and heard in Thursday’s hearing—it will cause him to examine a heretofore willfully-unexamined life and the lives he affected forever by his recklessness, ruthlessness, arrogance, and his total disdain for at least one young girl’s vulnerability.
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