1967

People who have been following my AudioBoos have noted that I seem to have a focus on the year 1967. The Summer of Love was a pivotal time for me for a couple of reasons. The first is that it was the summer between my Junior High School years and my Senior High School years. For a lot of people this is a period of transition for them. Actually, I guess that it is a transition into a transition period; that summer I was going from my child into the period I would transition into my adulthood.

The other event of that year was more important for the structure of my family. In late spring my younger brother developed a case of spine meningitis. My younger brother was 12 years younger than I am, so he was 2 years old at the time.The disease was life threatening, and my parents attention was focused for sometime that year on his health.

This left my siblings and I out of their direct attention for awhile. This does not mean that we were running wild, because being from a small town meant that my parents' family and friends stepped in to help. There were two particular developments that came of this. The first was that not everyone though the same way as my parents. While I was growing my parents were very opposed to going out to get a bite to eat. Why would someone want to eat something prepared at a restaurant when you could get the same thing at home that was better quality and cheaper. My parents friends took my siblings and I out to restaurants, and I discovered that when you went out to eat there were other people out there too, and eating out was also a social event. Home is a good place to eat, but eating in restaurants could be a nice social event.

The second things was that one of my cousins came to spend part of the summer with us. She was only a couple of years old than me, but her family background was significantly different than ours. Because of her families history, she looked at the structure of the family differently that my family did. Her family structure was that they would work together more as a team. In my family everyone had their jobs and each were expected to do them; we did not work together. She was not in my family long enough to help it develop a new structure, but I did get a glimpse into an alternate structure.

Finally, the summer was an opportunity for me go out and read a book and listen to music by myself. I learned that being along did not necessary mean that I was lonely, and this was an important development.

What are memories?

I have been doing a series of AudioBoos this year around the music I remember from my younger days. I have over 50 of them completed, and now I starting to think about what makes a memories for us. Now I have learned for the Music Memories that memories are not always facts. A person does not remember things exactly as they were. Memories are always different for the actual events they are based.

First, being the finite creatures that people are, we are notable to absorb everything that is happening around us. Even when a person is totally immersed in a situation there are always more things happening in the event than one person can observe. Even at the time of an event, a person does not remember all of the details of the event. It starts out incomplete.

Second, all people have filters, which are used to prioritise information which is remembered. There are things that people feel are important to remember, while there are other things that are not important. These filters are unique to each individual. So the memories that two individuals have of the same event will be unique to each.

So memories just are not a factual account of a event, but then memories are the things that affect how a person acts. They are the internal motivation each person has, and so they are what makes our background.