Saturday Memory for May 23rd 2026
I’m recalling my first international conference where I presented a paper at the International Congress of Psychiatry in Madrid, Spain. This was in 1965, I don’t recall the title of my paper, but what I do recall is that I and several colleagues went for a walk. At one point, we found ourselves behind the conference cater and discovered a number of large posters covered with tarps. In looking at the posters, we found they were all the image of Franco, that had been taken down from their posting on the conference center. As we were doing this, we were chased by the police. We escaped back inside the conference center before they caught us. They were really rough looking hombres!
What is the purpose of remembering this today?
I was not trying to remember but I did open this file to write down whatever presented itself. So I can’t claim any conscious success. I’m just scribing what appeared when I stared at the blank page. I can’t help but feel there is someething to learn from these “presented” memories. I’ll post whatever I come up with.
Russ, it is fascinating to see which memories float up while others do not. By the time someone is 40 years old, they could have hundreds of thousands of discrete memories stored, each tagged in some way to some external or internal event. Why some memories resist fading, while others beg for an audience, is a right subject to engage one’s mind. It is, as you point out, so many of these memories can, if we let them, take us down the rabbit hole (like Alice) to find not what we were looking for, but maybe something else that offers even more of a reward. Letting such memories bubble up has the real potential to let each of us weave a unique tapestry of events wrapped in the threads of time and tied off with a bow of deep emotions to hang on the wall and muse on. Time well spent.