TOADTalk: What We Remember

As the months go by in a Thacher school year, students and faculty members learn about each other in a thousand different ways, times, and contexts: around the breakfast or formal dinner table, in a sunshiny moment on the Pergola or a sunset shared on a trail, at the whiteboard in a classroom, lab, studio or seminar circle, at practices and games and rehearsals, at coffeehouses and Open Houses, in dorm common rooms, and in Suburbans on highways or back roads on the way to community service projects, field trips, cultural excursions, or athletic events. Then there’s each faculty member’s TOADtalk. Monday morning’s all-School Assembly launches with whatever the Teacher On Active Duty wishes to share—a reflection, a story or song, a demonstration of some sort, or a simple poem. In this way, every week of the school year, the community gains a new window into the mind or heart or spirit of one of our own. 

Gallia Vickery, whose TOADtalk is featured below, teaches math, serves as the School's AP Coordinator, and directs the Dance Ensemble. Ms. Vickery has worked at the School since 1991 and lives on campus with her husband, Bill.

During spring break I spent some time with my parents who live in Arizona. My father is suffering from early stages of dementia. He’ll struggle to find his granddaughter’s name, or the name of the college he went to, or the town I live in. It’s difficult and a bit sad, but one evening at dinner he told this story about when he was a little boy that I don’t think I'd ever heard before. My mother said he seems clearer when he talks about experiences in his past than when he needs to remember information here and now.

This all got me to thinking more about memory in general. I’m not coming from any kind of research here, but just from personal experience. I am intrigued by what I remember and what I don’t and what’s reliable in my memory.

For me it’s seems that actively working on memorizing things always worked. I can still recite the United States of America in alphabetical order, and various lines from Hamlet and Macbeth—“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools. The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!”—but I can’t remember or even picture the teachers who asked me to learn those things. I can also remember the “tenuous, innocuous, aggregate” SAT flashcards I studied on the bus on the way to dance class, but I don’t really remember taking the SAT. On the other hand, I frequently argue with my brothers when reminiscing about street names in our childhood neighborhood or television show characters. Sometimes I remember information and sometimes I don’t.

And I think we overvalue information. And information without emotion, or even without interpretation. As Joe Friday said in Dragnet (faculty, who remembers that?) we want “Just the facts, ma’am”—or more recently from the latest James Bond movie,“Only information matters.” I don’t agree. Experiences matter and how we feel and process these experiences are what matter most. Which brings me to another thing I heard about memory that sticks with me. We remember most vividly and most deeply times of greatest joy and greatest sorrow.

I was thinking about three memories I have of experiences that affected me deeply and thought I’d share them as each is unique and as Dr. Vyhnal said a TOADTalk can be a time you all learn a bit more about us. The first is from my childhood. My father is a Russian Orthodox Priest (that’s a TOADTalk in itself) so I grew up in the church. Easter Sunday we had midnight liturgy. There were some quiet prayers and slow songs, the church was dimly lit and the congregation held candles. Then we went outside and processed around the church three times. When the priest (my father) got to the front doors of the church with the choir behind him he would proclaim Christ is Risen in his rich, baritone voice and open the doors. The church was filled with light, there were Easter lilies everywhere and all the cloths over the tables and in the altar had been changed to white and gold. As a child I remember thinking this was magical, and that feeling I’ll never forget. I told my father this memory and he smiled and took a deep breath and I could see in his eyes that he understood.

Memory #2: More than thirty years ago our daughter Melissa was born. The birth wasn’t too difficult for me and I was happy and exhausted. But what I remember most was this moment I woke up from a nap to see Bill sitting across from me holding our newborn. I was able to just watch him for a minute or two, touching her cheek, looking at her adoringly. That moment I’ll never forget.

Memory #3: One of my favorite modern dance pieces is a duet set to Ravel’s Bolero, choreographed by Lar Lubovitch. I think the best music, art, and dance comes from genuine emotional depths. Words can’t often describe it because description labels feelings and experiences in shallow ways, unless you’re a poet. This dance piece is an extraordinary love duet and the dancers I saw perform it were so committed and the movements were so fluid, the partnering so effortless. I was young when I saw it for the first time and I’ll never forget it. I actually don’t want to see it again—because the memory I have of how I felt is so rich I’m afraid to alter or lose it.

And at these moments it doesn’t matter to me what I feel, or that I can describe or express what I feel, (even though I’m trying to do just that right now) it only matters to me that I feel and that the experience is rich and that I’m out of my head and in the moment. Standing here talking about these things I can experience them all over again —I can have that moment, a deep breath, a precious memory.

What if life isn’t about information, about thinking, analyzing, knowing? (What if it doesn’t matter at all that you remember any of the derivatives or integrals I may be teaching right now?) What if the only things you remember at the end of your life are the things you experienced and felt, when you let yourself just breathe and be.

I’d like to think less and feel more. I wish for you all things you’ll experience and feel deeply, truly and forever because those are the things you’ll remember.