I have reached the age where my bookshelf has stopped being a collection and started being an archaeological dig.
Every spine is a strata sample of someone I used to be. Philosophy texts underlined with the reckless certainty of twenty. Educational psychology books highlighted by a young teacher who still believed a great lesson plan could fix almost anything. Camping guides stained with coffee from trips now measured in decades, not miles. Somewhere down there, a dog-eared Meditations leans against a stack of Star Wars novels, and beside them, journals enough to suggest that if I couldn’t make sense of my life, I could at least keep a detailed record of my confusion.
I remember buying nearly all of them.
I don’t always remember what they taught me.
Maybe that’s the actual lesson.
There’s a scene in The Last Jedi (not necessarily a great film, but as a Star Wars geek, it’s like pizza… even if it’s bad, it’s still good) that I keep returning to — not the lightsaber duels, not the explosions, but two old friends sitting under a tree while a “library” burns.
Luke is mourning his failures. Yoda shows up not as the infallible sage of my childhood but almost mischievously, laughing as the sacred texts seemingly go up in smoke. Luke protests. Yoda just smiles.
The Burden of Masters
“We are what they grow beyond. That is the true burden of all masters.”
I heard that line professionally, albeit later in my career — a career built entirely around helping children become adults who no longer need me. That’s education’s quiet paradox: the job is to work yourself out of a job. The best teachers eventually become unnecessary, and if you’re doing it right, you throw yourself a small, private goodbye party every June.
Lately, though, I’ve started hearing the line differently.
Maybe Yoda wasn’t only talking about students.
Maybe he was talking about parents.
My Father, Mid-Sentence
My father has started forgetting things. Not dramatically — nothing you could point to and call a moment. Just enough. He pauses a beat longer before a story lands. Names go missing mid-sentence. Directions he’s driven a thousand times get uncertain. Family memories arrive with pages torn out.
He still laughs at his own jokes before he finishes telling them, which, honestly, has always been true and is not a symptom of anything except being my father. But every so often, something quieter and stranger surfaces — not the forgetting itself, but the realization that I had always assumed memory was jointly owned property. That my childhood existed safely, redundantly, backed up in two places at once.
Now I’m not so sure.
If he loses the fishing trip, did it happen exactly the way I’ve been telling it all these years? If the conversation in the garage disappears from him, who’s left to be its historian? Who gets to certify the record?
Memory, it turns out, was never an archive. It’s collaborative editing, and one of the editors is starting to log off.
The psychologist Frederic Bartlett argued this almost a century ago — that remembering isn’t playback, it’s reconstruction. Every time we recall something, we also quietly rewrite it, shaded by mood, by who we’ve become since, by the story we need it to tell. Modern cognitive science has mostly backed him up: memory is less a filing cabinet and more a rough draft we keep re-editing for the rest of our lives.
Which means we’ve all been revising our autobiographies the entire time. Some of us are just starting to lose the manuscript. I don’t want to be one of those people, despite the promise of inevitability shared with me by my late aunt: “Nobody’s getting off this rock alive.” True dat.
Remember Me
There’s another scene that won’t leave me alone.
Near the end of Coco, Miguel sings “Remember Me” to his great-grandmother, who has nearly disappeared into dementia. Names are gone. Faces have drifted loose from their moorings. And then the melody reaches somewhere memory can’t quite touch, and — impossibly — she joins in. Not because she remembers the details. Because underneath the damaged filing cabinets, something had been waiting there the whole time, patiently, for someone to come looking.
Neuroscientists have actually documented versions of this: musical memory often survives forms of dementia that erase nearly everything else. Songs seem to travel on different neural roads than ordinary autobiographical recall — sometimes melody gets somewhere language can’t reach anymore.
Maybe memory doesn’t live in one address. Maybe it lives wherever meaning refuses to check out. There’s something close to hope in that. We may lose the facts before we lose the affection.
As educators we spend enormous energy trying to make things stick — vocabulary, dates, formulas, principles. And we know now, thanks to researchers like Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, that durable learning isn’t about storing information once and trusting it to stay put. It’s about retrieval — the act of dragging something back into the light, again and again, on purpose. You don’t remember by rereading. You remember by reaching.
I think relationships might run on the same mechanism.
The people who matter most to us aren’t remembered simply because we once met them. They stay present because we keep retrieving them — in conversation, in photographs, text threads secreted away on devices, in holiday cards squirreled into boxes under beds, in songs that ambush us in grocery stores, in no reason at all except that it’s Tuesday and they crossed your mind.
A Long Retrieval Practice
Yeah, I’ve got one of those. We’ve occupied each other’s lives long enough that I’ve genuinely lost track of where one chapter ends and the next begins. Sometimes close. Sometimes impossibly far apart. Sometimes friends in the uncomplicated sense of the word, sometimes something that stubbornly refused to be filed under any single category. Geography got involved. Careers did. Entire other lives got built in the meantime.
And still — the connection persisted. Not constantly. Not cleanly. Just persistently, the way certain constellations vanish into daylight without ever actually leaving the sky.
I’ve started to wonder whether some relationships were never meant to be measured in proximity, only in continuity — where the years function as commas instead of periods, and the conversation just… resumes, as if no time passed at all, because in the ways that count, none really did.
Generation X occupies an odd little pocket of history for this. We grew up drinking from garden hoses and wandering neighborhoods until the streetlights told us to come home, and we learned independence mostly because nobody had gotten around to writing the manual explaining why we shouldn’t need it. We got very good, very early, at self-reliance. We also got very good at pretending not to need anyone — one of our quieter, less advertised survival skills. Subsequent generations have their traumas and their self-appointed acronyms that all contain a V for victim, but we were ZFG before it was cool….
Still, we know how to disappear into careers. Responsibilities. Competence. We are, generationally, excellent at functioning. We are considerably less practiced at the sentence “I missed you,” which is a shame, because it’s a short sentence and it tends to do a lot of good work.
Who Remembers Us Into Being
Ontology asks what it means to exist. Epistemology asks how we know what we know. Middle age, apparently, adds its own question to the syllabus: who remembers us into being?
Because identity was never purely internal. We exist inside ourselves, yes, but we also exist — maybe more durably — inside the minds of the people who carry our stories for us. That may be why forgetting is so frightening. It isn’t only the loss of information. It’s the loss of witnesses.
Every old friend remembers a version of you nobody else ever met. Every parent remembers a child who technically no longer exists. Every person who has ever loved you in the strange, resistant-to-definition way that outlasts geography remembers conversations that quietly shaped two lives at once. When one memory starts to fade, the other one — the surviving one — becomes almost unbearably precious.
So maybe Yoda was right in ways he never got around to articulating. The burden of every master is eventually being surpassed. The burden of every parent is eventually being forgotten, at least in part. The burden of every child is eventually becoming the keeper of the family’s stories. And maybe the burden of every relationship worth having is figuring out, honestly, whether memory alone is ever going to be enough — or whether, at some point, it’s time to stop retrieving the past and go make something new to remember.
A Few Things I Think I’ve Learned
- Memory is a draft, not a record. We’re all editing our own histories in real time; the people who lose that ability aren’t losing something we ever really had in a fixed form either.
- Retrieval is the whole game. Facts, formulas, people — none of them stay unless you keep reaching for them on purpose. Passive affection fades the same way passive studying does.
- Some memory outlasts language. Music, ritual, the specific way someone laughs — these travel roads that facts can’t always find. Lean on them.
- Forgetting isn’t the tragedy. Failing to retrieve intentionally is. The information was there. Nobody went looking for it.
- Continuity beats proximity. Distance and time are not, on their own, evidence that something has ended.
What To Do With Any Of This
Call your parents. Ask the questions you’ve been assuming could wait one more year — they can’t, not indefinitely, and “later” is not actually a plan. Record their stories while there’s still someone to correct the details. Tell your own, while you still remember which parts you embellished.
Revisit the places that still know your name. Sing the songs. Read the old letters. Laugh at the inside jokes that no longer make sense to anyone but the two people who made them, which is, incidentally, the entire point of an inside joke.
Send the message you’ve been drafting in your head for months. You know the one.
Learning, in the end, may just be remembering with a little more wisdom attached. And love may be the longest retrieval practice there is — the one you don’t get a grade on, the one that only works if you keep showing up to take it.
Someday, decades from now, someone may ask about us. Maybe the details will be fuzzy by then. Maybe we’ll disagree about the chronology, or laugh because neither of us can quite reconstruct who reached out first after all those years apart. I hope that’s true. It would mean we’d had enough time together, eventually, to forget the beginning — because we were too busy living in everything that came after it.
Until then, I’ll keep retrieving. Just in case memory, like everything else worth having, grows stronger every time we choose to bring it back.
El Gigante Picante del Monte 