I’ve been learning about the famous memory loss of old people. We don’t just forget generally, as most people think. We forget particularly. I do not remember the name of the lovely lady I met after church last week. Sometimes I don’t remember the event itself, much less a detail like a name, but with some prodding, I can occasionally find some tangential memory (for example, how my back was hurting from sitting in the pew so long), and the event will surface, perhaps even with the detail of the lady’s name. “Oh yes,” I may respond to the prodder, “she was quite nice.” There is some kind of judge in charge of my memory bank that didn’t see the lady’s name as an asset to be deposited.

That judge seems to find other—and odder—things more worthy of keeping. I remember from time to time, for no reason I can come up with, the smell of wild onions. I’ve heard that olfactory memories are the longest lasting of all the various sorts of memories, but why I should remember that smell is a mystery. I think it’s connected to foraging, a term I didn’t know until I went to school but an activity I knew as well as breathing when I was a child in the Georgia pinewoods. Farming, for those who were lucky enough to have a few acres, was what everyone did all day every day, but it was unreliable as a sole source of food. I think my grandfather would have been completely nonplussed if anyone suggested to him that hunting was a “sport”. On a good day, he might have brought home a rabbit or two, but more often, just a few birds, squirrels, or possums. The children foraged. We gathered up wild onions that grew in dank places among the trees, dandelion greens, blackberries, wild Chickasaw plums, muscadines, and there are parts of a pine tree that are edible. There were a few other things we foraged that I don’t want to mention.

Perhaps we remember some things like the smell of wild onions because of what is associated with them. Foraging. Hunger. Other things. I don’t know why we choose to remember some things and forget others, but the choice is not a conscious one. It’s the memory judge that chooses. So, lately, I remember thinking a good bit when I was a small child about what God might look like. We were made in his image, Sunday School said, and so I thought he was a man, an old man—he had to be old to be the father of everybody who ever lived—but did he have armpits? Toenails? Did God have the same body functions we have? I remember being frightened by my irreverence, but then immediately confused: If we are made in his image, then all those things must be so. Confusion outwrestled fear and I asked a grown-up about it. I was harshly reprimanded and then advised by an understanding mother: “It’s better not to think about some things.” Intellect was put in its place.

Years later, the repressed intellect staged a mighty revolt and demanded that everything—including God—explain itself. This went on for quite a long time. Mostly, what I remember about that long period is a general unhappiness, more accurately a lack of joy, relieved only rarely by nature, which would give me a kind of merciful peace, a feeling that “all shall be well”.  Then I met John Keats, who talked about “negative capability”, or the capability of accepting things we don’t understand. Slowly, not all at once, I was able to love, not out of need, duty, or sentiment, but out of simple joy in the unexplained being of a person, a tree, a dog (there’s so much to love that life isn’t long enough!) and then–him.

 So now, just as the smell of a wild herb evokes hunger—two things so seemingly unrelated—irreverence and confusion abide together quite compatibly though unrelated, or so it would seem. Not for the first time I know the simple wisdom of my mother, who loved with such undemanding liberality. The intellect would demand an explanation of such irrational connections, but the intellect is a different faculty from memory, which has its own judge and brooks no interference from the intellect.  (I suspect that memory sees intellect as something of a busybody.) “The child is father to the man” – Wordsworth. I always wanted to grow up into childhood and I am grateful that I can remember the smell of wild onions.