What’s in my wallet? 

Not cash, not for a long time. Only one card, until now, as well.

Somewhere along the way I got confuddled by points, rewards, and miles, and essentially use a debit card that does not reward me, but does keep track of the actual balance in my bank account. I haven’t thought about credit cards for a while until I was offered a card that would allow me to buy stuff I frequently buy online without being charged for shipping. Free monograms, too, as if I need to see my initials every time I put on my pajamas. I hang them up in the morning; I can pretty much expect that they are still mine when I head to bed at night.

Let’s leave suppositions about my pajamas aside; it’s been a while since I divulged my most notably guarded secrets in order to register a card I barely need and will hardly use. Name, address, email – sure. But then came the security questions, intimate information that only I and whatever nameless, faceless corporate entity compiling the shards of my life will share.

I’ve handled those in the past with ease. Best friend as a kid? No problem. Favorite football team? You’re kidding. Michigan, Duh. But this time, the question asked was: “What’s the name of a college you applied to but did not attend.” 

Uh, now they’re not only asking me to scuff around in memories established when I was essentially brain fogged by hormones and family drama, they are also hitting me right in the mistakes I’ve made/choices I flubbed/ opportunities I let slide away jackpot.

Between CATS, Freud, Oliver Sachs, and Marcel Proust, the subject of memory has been extravagantly worked over. Assuming you have the score of CATS pinging in your brain at all times, I need only ask: “Midnight. Has the moon lost its memory?” Too rich for my blood and one more example of a tentative fungo hit into a field of surmise. On the other hand, Sigmund Freud was a physician even when working in the realm of the subconscious mind, and he too had his doubts about memory: “Our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more frequently than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says.” Oliver Sachs, a neurologist (author of the remarkable The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat), took it a step further. “It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened – or may have happened to someone else.”

Wait. What? Our memories may have happened to someone else? Is the corollary that someone is walking around with my memories? Actually, with only a moment’s reflection, I’ve got a boatload of memories I would be happy to offload.

Be that as it may, Rosiland Cartwright, a neuroscientist whose research was primarily in the area of sleep (a phenomenon which we don’t understand, by the way), argues that “Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original … it is a continuing act of creation.”  

That supposition may have its most compelling example in the work of Marcel Proust, whose novel A la recherche du temps perdu/In Search of Lost Time, is comprised of seven volumes, over a million words, examining recollections of childhood and adulthood, famously inspired (maybe) by a crumb of a puffy cake known as a madeleine. 

Here’s a tiny excerpt:

”And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. … Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? … And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.”

I rarely read all seven volumes, but the notion endures that a sight, a smell, a warm wind on one’s shoulders can catapult us into a rich tapestry of memory, a notion that persists despite the discovery that in the first draft it was a tartine rather than a madeleine that shook loose Proust’s avalanche of memory.

What shook loose the avalanche at my desk was the ostensibly unprovocative “What college did you apply to but did not attend?”

I can’t reveal the one word answer that is now among the tightest of safety precautions attached to my financial record, but let’s just pretend that it is a name that signifies the highest aspiration of any college applicant, a name that evokes tradition, excellence, and a passport to a lifetime of power and privilege. So, but, I did not attend. Looking back on it, I got some juice throughout most of my senior year as an applicant to this bastion of academic superiority. I was just as not-denied as thousands of other applicants; decisions used to arrive by mail on or around April 15th in those days, so I got a good long run out of an application that was doomed from the outset. I was also not denied yet at another smaller but also snappy college, more than good enough when it came to sweatshirt recognition. Oh, and I also applied to this other college, I guess, because … well, I wanted to be nice to the admissions representative who actually spoke to me and encouraged me to apply. He wasn’t as sharply dressed as the other college reps, and the letter he sent after his visit had a troubling grammatical error. “It was nice to OF met you,” he wrote. ‘Nice to HAVE met you,” I breathed, giving him the benefit of the doubt as his secretary might have misunderstood his dictation. In hindsight I suspect it was a form letter, so not great, but also an actual letter, putting this third place option in a different category than the other not-to-be-attended non options.

It was the only college in straits dire enough to accept me.

I still have that letter, along with the report cards chronicling my lackluster performance throughout my school career. The trace memory of myself as the younger person not attending those colleges has changed over the years; I can see myself as I was  more clearly now, disappointed that I floated along so thoughtlessly, so carelessly, but aware that I had shut down well before I was sent to boarding school at the age of ten. I kept my terminally unimpressive reports, along with various letters warning me of imminent ejection from schools and college so that my children would never feel pressured to excel. All three were and are substantial people, not a shred of carelessness among them; they have racked up academic honors and found lives of purpose.

So, that worked.

If I was any good as a teacher during a career of more than forty years, it was because I had been the student who didn’t engage, didn’t get traction, couldn’t catch on first time around. I worked with kids of great ability whose reports looked very much like mine. I knew what many other teachers hadn’t figured out – nobody WANTS to be in the doghouse. And, Mr. What College Did You Not Attend, I wrote a guide identifying great college options for students who would not be striding across the campus at that bastion of academic prestige.

So, that worked too.