As I think I have said before, there were other years when I published a blog. One of those years was 2009, and I have a print out of the entire blog. I wasn’t as religious as I have been with my current blog, which is published every day, but I probably did write something two or three days a week, of various types and various lengths, so there is a lot to look at. And last week I decided to look at it, and last night I finished reading through the entire year.

Now we are talking about 15 years ago, and it turns out I was quite busy that year – restaurants, concerts, books, a couple of trips. The usual. And I kept a record of it all, for whatever reasons I had at the time. And, although I was still practicing law then, I didn’t mention anything about my work at all.,

As I read through my year of 2009, what surprised me the most is how much I don’t remember. You could divide my year into three categories – things I remember, things that I had forgotten about but remember once I am reminded of them, and things that look to me like they must have been experienced by someone else. And – although I didn’t count things up and the three segments feel relatively equal – I wouldn’t be surprised if the category “things I have forgotten about completely” were the biggest.

For example, on March 30, 2009, I noted that I had read Andre Maurois’ biography of Disraeli, and that I had, in 2008 read his biography of Shelly. Now, I could tell you a fair amount about these books (not everything of course, but a fair amount) today. But that’s not because I read them in 2008 and 2009. I read them again in 2022 or 2023, as part of my reading through many of my Penguin paperbacks. They were both interesting books, relatively short and undoubtedly not complete, but containing enough information to give you a good sense of what Shelly and Disraeli were like, or at least what Maurois thought they were like. But, to my knowledge and belief, I had no clue that I had read them 15 or so years earlier.

On the other hand, there are some things I remember well. I remember going to see both The Winters Tale (Shakespeare) and Arcadia (Stoppard) at the Folger Theater, but I don’t remember seeing four Chekhov plays (three as readings, one fully staged) at Theater J at all.

In August of 2009, we took a trip to Nova Scotia. I remember the ferry from Portland, and I remember a number of things we did in Nova Scotia, staying with my college roommate who has a summer house (it belonged to his Canadian father) there.

In Nova Scotia, I remember driving through the area where a UFO had supposedly landed in the not so distant past (Canada’s answer to Roswell), I remember buying a cap that I still have at a fish company, I remember seeing the Bay of Fundy and being surprised at how nice the town of Wolfville was, along with Acadia University there, I remember the nice provincial patrolman who stopped me for driving too fast, I remember the drive back through New Brunswick and our stopping at Fredericton on the way back, and so forth.

None of these memories made by post where I recapped our trip. In the post, I spoke about restaurants that I don’t remember at all, about museums (the Nova Scotia Museum of Art, which I didn’t like, and the Rossignol Cultural Center, which I did) that I can’t imagine that I went to, or the Joggins Fossil Cliffs that we apparently visited (and were fascinated by) near Truro.

The only things in my note that I really remember about Nova Scotia was the casual dinner party that my roommate’s neighbor hosted, and the cemetery where victims of the Titanic are buried anonymously, some on the Christian side, and twelve (I think) on the small Jewish side of the cemetery. And I don’t know why my notes didn’t mention the pedestrian signs in hilly Halifax, which simply say “Slippery Slope”.

But there’s more. The entry on our trip talked about us stopping in Ridgefield CT to see my sister’s stepson and his family, and then stopping in Kennebunkport Me to see friends of Edie and, at the same time, seeing daughter Michelle and her then boyfriend, who were vacationing in southern Maine at the same time. Now I do remember Ridgefield and Kennebunkport and some (not all) of the things my blog said we did there but, for some reason, I don’t at all remember those stops as being part of the same trip that led us to Nova Scotia. Even reading about it did not jog my memory to realize that this was the same trip.

Well, this is just 2009. I have lived every year since 1942. (That’s why I am 80+) In each of these years (most had 365 days, about 20 at 366 days), I have done a number of things every day. How many of these things do I remember?

OK, ask me about second grade, and I can tell you three or four things that happened at school (out of hundreds or thousands), but I can’t tell you anything that I know happened that year out of school, either after school or on weekends or during the summer. At all.

I guess I just never thought about this in this way before. About how much of my life is a mystery to me. About how much that has happened I have no clue about. I guess the moral is: if you want to know how much you have forgotten, keep a diary.