I am Kyle's self-indulgence

Erika's brother Ian visited us this weekend, which was very exciting for Daniel. This morning at breakfast he was jabbering away about uncle Ian and what we all did together, and at one point he said, "You know, yesterday, we unfold the bench and uncle Ian just lay down on it."

I should mention here that Daniel still uses the words "yesterday" and "last night" to refer to anytime in the past: last week, two months ago, and earlier the same day are all "yesterday" to him.

So we were sitting and trying to figure out just what Daniel could be thinking about. Ian certainly hadn't done anything this weekend involving any benches. Then an idea struck me. "Daniel, are you talking about the couch that folds out into a bed?"

"Yeah."

I didn't immediately remember that happening either, but Ian said that when he visited us last summer he slept on the hide-a-bed and that when Daniel woke up in the morning he went out and laid in it with him. Ian said that he was excited about it at the time and it may be something he would remember.

Yes, I pointed out, but that was an entire year ago. Daniel was barely two years old then. The fact that he can remember such a specific detail from that long ago is impressive. What's even more interesting is that he would not have had the vocabulary a year ago to tell us about it the way he did this morning, and we certainly haven't discussed it with him at all since then. That means that he retained it as a purely visual memory and only found the words to talk about it a year later, when he finally recalled it. This goes directly against the theory in psychology that our memories are primarily verbal, and that the reason we typically don't remember things before the age of 2-3 is that we don't have the words for it.

So I thought this was all a pretty cool revelation, and it got me thinking a lot about memory. Specifically, it caused me to realize that Daniel is now at the age that he is forming permanent memories. From here on out, the things he experiences could stay in his mind for the rest of his life.

I've been thinking back to some of my earliest memories. The primary landmark for my memory is my third birthday. I remember my parents giving me a chalkboard on an easel, and I know it was my third birthday because it had a big number 3 written on it. From there I can trace backward. I turned three when we were living in Scottsbluff. I also remember when we moved into that house and I'm pretty sure I have a few fleeting memories of when we were living in Columbus before that.

These memories are so brief and so few that they are very precious to me. In fact, I feel that way about most of my childhood memories, especially the ones about my father. Sometimes I think that if I could conjure up every single memory I have from age 2 to 9, and watch them back to back like a movie, it would take less than a day to get through them all. That's seven years of my life in a single day.

Memory is such a fragile thing that every experience that can actually survive into adulthood is precious. I wonder what kinds of things Daniel is going to remember when he's older. I'm willing to bet that his train ride at the zoo will make the cut. Earlier this month we went to Nebraska to visit my mom, and one day we took the Daniel and Eva to the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha. I hadn't been there in years and I wanted the kids to see it. It turns out that we picked probably the busiest day of the year to go (Friday, the day before Independence Day) and we had a very difficult time in traffic just trying to get there. We ended up spending most of the day there and the kids missed their naps, but it was totally worth it. The kids enjoyed every minute.

The highlight for Daniel, though, was riding the train. Today when Daniel talks about our zoo trip (which is frequently), the first and often only thing he brings up is riding the train. He doesn't even mention the elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses (rhinoceros? rhinoceri?), or any of the other animals we saw that day, but he will talk all about the train. It makes me feel good to think that when he is 30 years old he might still remember with fondness the time he rode the zoo train with his dad.

What's interesting to me is that we almost didn't do it. Throughout the day we had seen the train going by us periodically as we walked, and every time Daniel was beside himself at the sight of it. Late in the afternoon, when it was getting close to time to leave, we happened to come up on one of the boarding stations as the train was stopped. Daniel was begging us to go and look at it. I don't think the thought had even crossed his mind that he could ride it: he just wanted to see it up close. Erika and I are pretty frugal with money, and we don't normally like to pay for unnecessary expenses. For us it makes more sense to just walk around the zoo than to pay extra money to ride a train around it once. But we were in a pretty good mood that day, and Daniel did love the train so much. We debated for several minutes about whether or not we should take Daniel on the train. Eva certainly wouldn't be able to sit still for it, so someone would have to stay behind with her and wait, and I didn't know if that would be a good idea, since it was so late and she hadn't had a nap. We finally decided that for Daniel, to ride the train would be the highlight of an already spectacular day, so I bought the tickets.

Considering the way he's talked about the train ride since then, I do think that this will be for him one of those priceless early childhood memories. When I consider it in that light, it's hard to believe that I even considered not doing it. It was about $8 and 30 minutes for an experience that could stay with him for the rest of his life.