Caregiver Activity – Memory Lane

On a recent morning during breakfast the song “Ruby Jean and Billie Lee” by Seals and Croft came up on the iPod. This song sometimes moved me to tears when I listened to this same iPod in our tent on the Pacific Crest Trail. The song holds wonderful memories because of a wall hanging Cindy made for me while we were dating. Inside a large picture frame lies a small photo of us holding hands while hiking along the tableland of Katahdin, at the end of our 1980 Appalachian Trail hike. Filling up the rest of the picture frame are dried leaves and two lyrics from the Seals and Croft song on singed parchments. In the upper left corner is “We’ll go where the daysprings run together and live as one;” in the lower right is “He is the object of our longing and we’re His creation. Seals and Croft”

The wall hanging is now in our kitchen, framed by the rainbow and hiker signatures we gathered on Memorial Day weekend. When the “Ruby Jean and Billie Lee” song played I pointed Cindy towards the wall hanging. Independent of the lyrics, the music alone for that song is infused with a nostalgic feel. I reminded Cindy that she made that wall hanging for me and the lyrics came from the very song we were hearing. She began to tear up. I’ll never know exactly what this trip down memory lane involved for her, but I could tell this was a good kind of tearing up. I teased her, as I often do when she cries at happy endings, with “You’re such a sap!” We both smiled and hugged.

Cindy and her college roommate Jean

Memory lane is not easy for the memory-challenged. The memory has to be firmly ingrained to be extracted by words alone. Yet there are ways to call forth more memories: music, for example, or photos, or wall hangings. I have a suggestion for invoking memories that works particularly well with us, thanks to Cindy herself.

Cindy became the family archivist, digitizing thousands of photos over the years. The total is in the neighborhood of ten thousand photos, going all the way back to her early childhood. These are now stored on my computer in various folders. Whenever my computer is inactive the screensaver accesses one of these folders to provide a slideshow. By hooking the computer up to the television I provide better viewing for a roomful of people together, or simply to make an easier venue for Cindy to go down memory lane. She particularly lights up when she sees a photo of our children at a young age.

This set up provides a bit of redemption for me. I had good intentions of putting together scrapbooks and photo albums with Cindy once her affliction was diagnosed. That never happened. I’ve faced the fact that I will never get to the scrapbook materials; I leave those to our daughters if they so choose. Ah, but the photo albums no longer need to be done. Having them scroll across our television set provides a much better experience, plus the slide folders can be copied and distributed to anyone. Saved by technology! …. and by Cindy’s own dedicated work over the years. Little does my humble wife know how responsible she is for so many good memories.