As I write, the global community, at least much of it, is celebrating Mother's Day. My mom is gone now but time has no power to erase the memories I have of her. She was everything a kid, or a teen, a new mother or a proud grandmother could want. Once, in a crazy adventure, I tried to think of something negative about her but I couldn't come up with a thing. I still haven't unearthed anything.
There has been a lot of other memory-building material stored up in the past few weeks: the completion of a history book for our local credit union; the submission of yet another manuscript for a client whose family suffered pain and loss during the Holocaust and, not be overlooked, a wonderful weekend spent with a friend. Looking back I won't soon forget the efforts of a lot of determined people who worked hard to provide a financial option for the "common working man". Nor will I forget the pathos of poring over correspondence between families as they sought desperately to find and then to rescue one another.
Thank God, then, for the warm memories of laughter, reflection and learning shared during a recent Toastmaster convention.
People far more learned than I have defined memory as the manner in which information is acquired, stored, retained and later retrieved. If that's the case and I have no reason to doubt that it isn't, then what we stash away in our mind is the material that we'll later retrieve. Like it or not, memories are made of this and that.
"Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!" Isaiah 49:15
Thanks for the memories, Mom. Thanks for Your eternal remembrance, God!
