** Some names, numbers, words, and elements have been altered in this story for consent and confidentiality purposes. And, due to the nature of human memory.

 

Forgetting is not a failure of memory but a function of it.

— Oliver Hardt

 

When my father was a young man, maybe early twenties, he was accused of stealing livestock from a local farmer. This event has been unforgettable in the life of our family, not because any of us were there to witness it, but because we have watched and listened to him recount it time and time again, like a holy week homily—the reading of Jesus’ betrayal, year after solemn year.

Buck Johnson, (a young man my father had known for years before he ever became an officer of the law) came up to my job at Jensen Motor Company and said,

Charlie we need to bring you down to the station for questioning.

What for?

John Crenshaw’s sheep come up missing and they think you stole ‘em.

Let’s go, Daddy said to Buck, energized by such an asinine accusation.

Down at the police station officers sat him in an observation room.

Three or four of ‘em came in, one after another.  The sherriff told me, you better just confess ‘cause we know it was you, trust me, we got you.  

No, I won’t confess, because I didn’t steal anything.

 We know you did it son.

 The hell you do.

As the story goes, when the sheriff tired of trying to force a lie out of my father’s mouth, he’d send someone else in the room to ask the same damn questions. Eventually, Daddy asked for Buck Johnson to be sent back in. He had helped Buck’s uncle out from time to time out at his land and the older man had trusted him so readily that Daddy had been given keys and access to the property.

Buck, he asked the uniformed man, not much, if any older than he was, do you really think I did this?

I sure do. He said, without a moment’s hesitation.

Send one of them other sumbucks back in here then, Daddy yelled.

 You don’t listen to no-damn-body do you? Buck yelled back.  

Only if I have to, Daddy replied and then, with panache, and I damn sure don’t have to.

They all wrestled with one another for quite some time until the officers decided they were getting nowhere. Then one of them came in and said, in what I understand to be his deepest, and most threatening voice,

Well, if you are so confident how would you feel about taking a ride down to Austin and doing a lie detector?

 Ride Clyde Ride! Daddy says triumphantly, for us in our living room just as he did that day back at the police station. They took me down there wrapped me all up with wires and clamps stuck all over me.

“Yeaaaah,” they told me with a stack of paper in their hands “we got you, it says right here that you are lying.”

 Well, if I am lying, he told them, then the answer isn’t a yes or no, it’s a both, neither, or maybe so.

Young Daddy has had enough of all of this, and we all watch old Daddy in eager anticipation for the climax of this little play, because our favorite line is coming up.

I want you to call my lawyer Ben Denman, Daddy roars, and then, we, his children, time travel to that moment in his past and yell out with him as he screams

 

M-E-FOUR-FORTY-ONE-THIRTEEN!!!

 It is Judge Denman’s phone number as it would have been recited in 1950s, Florence Texas. I never even knew Ben Denman, certainly never heard of that kind of phone number before, but I have it committed to my memory should I ever have need to go back and say it with and for my father. Because, it is with this exclamation that everything begins to fall apart for these “men of the law”. They lose some gumption, begin to soften their tone,

aww, come on now, you don’t have to do that, they assure him. We can work this out.

I don’t have to, Daddy says, like the hero in a western, but I’m damn sure gonna.

When Ben Denman went down to the police station later than week to investigate he said there was no evidence a lie detector had ever been done. They’d just been hoping, it seems, that they might be able to create, cajole, conjure a memory, or at least a confession,  out of a man with his back against the wall, but if you knew Charles Fisher, you would know that he is a man unlikely to forget where he’s been and what he’s done, much less what has been done to him.  

I am my father’s daughter.

I don’t forget much that I have experienced.

Which might just be another way of saying, it is hard for me to

let

things

go.

 

And on the one hand, I don’t think everything should be let go of. This is what is tricky about the notion of forgetting, especially as it is so quickly and commonly associated with forgiving.

Forgetting can be so very many things— sloth, disrespect, dissociation, abandonment,

self-defense, self-advocacy, and freedom just to name a few. It cannot, I think, be an act of forgiveness. I heard a man named Matt Potts—a pastor who I really enjoy, speak eloquently about this recently. “Forgiveness” he said, “definitionally, requires a judgment—one that acknowledges that a wrong has been done.” I quite like that.

  Forgetting something stands in the way of acknowledging it though, doesn’t it? Whether it’s a birthday, a chore, or a way we have wronged another, if we do not practice and set up our lives in a way that encourages us to remember, we will never be able to properly take it seriously,  and thus never be able to forgive one another, or ourselves. It wouldn’t be right to let go of everything that has caused us pain and suffering. It wouldn’t be right to forget how my father was treated by men who thought they had more power than him.

 

But,

 what about letting some things go?

 

Recently, I provoked Daddy to tell the lie detector story for the family when I told him I’d almost used it in a recent sermon. If you do tell it, he said, take out some of the big words, by which he means “bad” words. So, to the degree that I have found any of his words to be “bad” you can rest easy knowing I have done so. I noticed at a certain point in this most recent retelling that he missed a line that he usually says.

You forgot the part where… I teased him.

Oh, I might forget a line here or there, he said.

 I read an article recently about memory. It said that researchers used to presume that forgetting was a passive act of atrophy in the brain. It isn’t. The mind, it turns out,  is wired to forget, probably, according to one hypothesis, because letting go of some of the details of our lives actually has a significant protective factor. If we can get the gist of something that we have experienced without hyper-commitment to the specifics, we are better able to transfer learning from one setting to another. And through the intentional forgetting mechanism, the brain makes space for new experiences, which leads to new learning, and new behavior more appropriate for what is actually needed now rather than what was needed in some overly specific perseveration from ten years ago.

 This all makes so much sense to me. Over the course of my life, I have remembered to remember over and over and over again. Maybe, at the expense of expansion. But I’m spending a lot of my time these days trying to grapple with this tension between remembering and forgetting—holding onto what is helpful and releasing what isn’t. Honoring all that I have survived, but also making room for the reality that exists for me today.  

Not to mention,

all that is to come.