I have a hobby; I’m a collector of memories. I really enjoy remembering times and situations from my past which were meaningful to me. Now in my forties, twenty years with my wife, and a child living an active and all too-quickly approaching pre-teen life, my memories have exceed my ability to…remember. Like the breadcrumb trail left to guide storybook children home, my memories are often represented with tangible things which have also become important to me. Pictures, documents, trophies, and knick-knacks which clutter my shelves and fill moving boxes are the placeholders for memories that I no longer have room for in my mind’s attic. I have begun to wonder if these breadcrumbs of my life will simply be eaten by the birds of time and carried off to be quietly forgotten. This memory overcrowding became evident to my wife and me a few weeks ago when we found yet another box of things from a prior move to our new house. It was a box filled with things to hang on our walls, or at least things that once had enjoyed honored places on the walls of our past. With great fondness we pulled each from their cardboard boxed and newspaper wrapped tombs, and we reflected about those meaningful times. We also noted with some regret that many of them are simply not reflective of who we are now. After some time lamenting the passing of time we decided that we wanted to create a memory room. We discussed that our memory room should be similar to what as J.K. Rowling elegantly described in her Harry Potter world as a pencive. Rowling’s pencive is a place (or thing) to store memories in and which can be used to occasionally relive those old memories. Our pencive, some might argue, will be something slightly less magical. While now referring to it as a memory room, we had been calling it our master bathroom. Yes, really, our master bathroom will now also function as our memory room.

Building our memory room was simple; it already existed and had (at least in my opinion) a very important role in our lives. Now transformed by nothing more than a few picture hooks, each morning I find myself seeing memories from our past. A certificate of an associate’s degree that has fallen off my resume, in a frame that I now think of as almost too hideous to hang even in a bathroom, but nonetheless reminds me of my first apartment. At the time that degree represented the most significant educational accomplishment of my life, and literally hundreds if not thousands of hours of effort. Next to it hangs a well-framed picture of the U.S. Army’s C-17 transport plane, which my wife and her team whose signatures adorn the picture’s matting helped to bring into existence. On another wall in our small memory room hangs a candid snap of my then twenty-something wife having a moment mixed with horror and exhilaration, shooting the rapids of a river and generally trying to not becoming “one” with what must have been a blur of passing river rocks. It is that last memory which I often think of most fondly, as I was not there to have experienced it. And yet I can see on her face in the picture from that particular day that it was, at that time in her life, a very important moment. We have come to conclude that it, and the others, are memories worth not losing to the passage of time in our busy lives.

I particularly love the idea of Rowling’s pencive, in part because one’s memories can be “relived” by others. Not long ago I lived that experience myself as my young daughter, my wife, my seventy-something father and I sat reading the poems of a grandmother who I never knew. She died before my memories had a chance to form, but she left behind her poems. It was her collection of her personal poems, elegantly bound by her family upon her death, which my wife was reading aloud to my daughter. They spoke of her thoughts, her dreams, and her fears. In one of her poems of note she talked of her brining home her first child, my father, now the old grandpa to my child. My wife’s soothing voice brought us all into the memories of my grandmother, and for a time we shared her memory with her. That seventy year old “memory” is now with us, as real as something that I experienced myself, and preserved within the pages of that collection. I found myself wondering how my grandchildren will know my memories, my perspectives as they changed and grew over time, and how my priorities have developed with my world view. Where will they turn to find my memories, and what have I done to ensure they will be there to be found?

My grandmother’s memories found their voice in her poetry, yet I am no poet. I have marveled at the letters from soldiers who have penned letters in foxholes from the wars of our founding fathers, to the equally brutal fields of Indonesia, and from the deserts this very day in another part of the world far away from my keyboard. With sincere gratitude to those making such sacrifices I do not find myself in the peril of war, but rather in the comfort of my home on the weekend enjoying an exquisitely beautiful day in Washington. Where then are the moments which will give birth to the records of my memories, which I can only hope will someday adorn the memory room of someone who cares about me. If not me, who will record the pictures of my memories, or mix ink with paper to record my thoughts? Upon melancholy reflection I realized that I do, in fact, record my memories. My ink has been replaced with bits in electronic memory and my paper merely exists in our now virtual world, but my blogs have become my snapshots to be returned to like the tattered photographs of my ideas, my emotions, and the signposts of what was important to me on that day. I find myself rereading blog posts only one season old, and yet they bring me back to ideas that would otherwise have been fleeting and perhaps lost. I find comfort in knowing that they are there, and that someday perhaps I may find a way to gather them into a collection even if only for someone to look back and say, “It’s time for me too to start gathering my memories.”

My thought for you today is your ideas today are your memories of tomorrow, and my hope for you is that they too become recorded in a way that enable you and your future loved ones understand who you were, what were then your priorities, and what you were thinking about. If my memory room is any indication, such written narratives, photographs, collected documents are worth keeping, even if they only find themselves adorning the private space that you occasionally visit. Your walks down your memories’ road may be short or merely occasional, but in my opinion well worth the effort of your travels.

One Sunday morning in September, near Seattle, WA.