|
Memory is a strange thing. In late 2008, when I started looking back at my computer diary files for 1990, the year that Soon E came to America, many things squared with what I remember but there were other thoughts I had noted, quotes I had written down, events that I had recorded, that had either been totally forgotten or that now seemed at odds with what I remembered.
For example, an entry in my computer diary for the night of December 10th, 1990, the night Soon E arrived in American that says:
I was in love by the time we got to Chang's house.
After 18 years, I didn't remember this but it certainly is typical of me. I had seen Soon E five separate times in Korea totaling not more than three hours. Chang and I had picked her up at the airport and now in the car on the way back to Andover, not more than 45 minutes since I first caught sight of her in the terminal, I was in love. Of course, I had certainly thought about her a lot during the past year or so.
It's clear that I may have to rethink some of the conclusions I've made about what happened in the past as I read things that I wrote within hours after they happened. And, of course, there is the opposite side of the coin, that things I have come to know since I wrote about them may appear in a different light now that I've accumulated mounds of additional information.
In some ways it's quite difficult, and even painful, to have to rethink things that I had come to accept. But the story that I'm telling is not fiction and I want to stay as close to the truth as a participant can. One of the advantages of writing this story on the web is that others who are a part of the story and still around will have the opportunity to correct errors or give their own interpretation. And nothing would make me happier than making their voices heard.
In the final analysis, I feel blest to have my diaries, contemporaneous evidence of what I was thinking, both to help me remember things I had forgotten and to correct misinterpretations I have made over the years.
Years before the personal computer, I had begun to make notes to myself about what I did each day. At one time, I printed out sheets that had the hours of the day with space to write notes at the appropriate point.
One of my main motivations in writing down this information arose when I started taking Excedrin for my migraine headaches in the 1970s. Mildeen, a friend and employee at Anna's and my computer composition company, Creative Composition, had learned that I suffered from migraine headaches. She was a fellow sufferer and had discovered something that helped: namely Excedrin. I gave it a try and was often able to beat a headache into submission or at least enable myself to continue to function by taking three of them at a time. Often I needed to repeat the procedure three times a day.
I would later learn that Excedrin is basically half Advil and half Tylenol with a helping of caffeine. It was undoubtedly the caffeine that gave me a high pretty quickly after taking them.
In 1984, I began to feel that I should keep a record of my Excedrin usage so that wouldn't fool myself into thinking I was taking less than I was. I needed to decide what to name the computer file. At first I thought of "headache" or maybe "medical". But these terms sounded so negative. I finally came up with "health". Since that time, more than 25 years ago, I would record every day in my "health" file: my weight, any exercise, what I ate, and any medicine that I took. I supplemented that with a "diary" file which was short paragraphs concerning events of the day.
|
