When Two Is Worth More Than Two
Anyway, I read about this story earlier this month and almost didn’t post it because it’s already been discussed or tracked on other blogs a million times. But the idea of the talisman, of the item that represents both the intense love this couple had and its loss, is central here.
Perhaps when this story gets told a few millennia from now, it may well have the sort of power The Odyssey (that’s off the top of my head, although I’m sure Wagner or another Romantic wrote an opera or play that better fits this story) has for (some of) us today:
A few weeks back, The New York Times’ City Room blog had a story about Myrta Gschaar, who found out definitively that her husband, Robert Gschaar, died at Ground Zero.
About three years after September 11, 2001, Mrs. Gschaar received her husband’s wallet, which contained irrefutable proof that her husband had perished: one of the two Jefferson $2 bills that he had gotten for each of them. According to City Room, Mr. Gschaar gave his fiancé one Jefferson and kept a second for himself. “They symbolized many things: that this would be the second marriage for both them, that they were two of a kind, that it would be a second chance for happiness,” writes City Room blogger David Dunlap.
Although Mrs. Gschaar hadn’t heard from her husband since he called her to say he was safe in the South Tower, the bill made his death final. She donated both bills, along with her wedding ring, to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.
Apparently she told the chief curator of the aforementioned Memorial and Museum: “I don’t need [the ring] anymore. I’m eternally wed to him. I want it to be with the $2 bill.”
Mrs. Gschaar now lives in Ohio.
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Why ‘Memory Token’
NYC Subway Tokens
Originally uploaded by photoshoparama
Originally I was going to call this blog If I Had Alzheimer’s.
Then I read a post on Daily Blog Tips called The 7 Characteristics of Good Domain Names that recommended choosing a domain name that is short and easy to remember and spell.
I thought: If I have to think at my keyboard to type “ifihadalzheimers.com,” no one else is going to bother.
So I began thinking of potential two-word domain names that had to do with memory — because this blog plans to look at different aspects of memory (more on that later).
I had an MTA pass tacked on my bulletin board from my last trip to New York, and I thought back to the years I lived there (1988-1992), when New York was about the only city that didn’t offer a pass of some sort. You had to buy tokens, which cost between $1 and $1.25 during those years.
Because I took the bus constantly (no easy way to get from West 82nd Street to East 55th Street at 11 pm), I often bought tokens 10 or more at a time, and they jangled in my pocket if I was wearing shorts. They were known as Bullseye tokens, brass with a steel center.
I loved those things and can’t believe that I didn’t save one. I guess I didn’t think New York would start offering passes like everywhere else (or truly I didn’t think about it at all). But “Memory Token” came of it, and amazingly, the domain was available.
And here we are…
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Proof of Attendance
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memory token, University High School, student ID, Fall 1952
Inspiring Terror, 90 Years Later
Grandma Sue just turned 98 on April 7th (although her birth certificate says she was born on May 2, 1910, and she says she was born during Passover that year, which only ran until May 1, 1910, so this is the subject of a whole ‘nother story), and she still plays bridge, listens to the Metropolitan Opera every Saturday morning during the season, reads The New Yorker weekly, and tries to walk 500 steps a day.
At her birthday party Saturday night (incidentally, my grandfather Aaron, her husband, would have turned 100 years old that night, along with Bette Davis), she attributed her longevity to walking and to not eating potato chips because they’re junk. The attendees went briefly silent, realizing that their lust for the fried potato would be the death of them, but anyway…
Grandma can certainly be repetitive (the usual: Have you been eating? Do you have any friends? Are you putting money into the bank?), but in the last couple of years, I’ve noticed that she repeats certain anecdotes to me with regularity.
The most notable one (and the one she has repeated the most lately—although my mind may have just latched onto this one and forgotten some of the others) happened over 90 years ago.
Grandma was seven years old, attending a public school on the Lower East Side. One morning in early November 1917, Grandma’s teacher showed up to Grandma’s second-grade class in a state of euphoria.
“We finally have a homeland!” she told the students. Then she provided an overview of Balfour Declaration, which stated British support for a national homeland for the Jews in Palestine.
Grandma was terrified. “I didn’t want to be shipped off to the desert. I wanted to stay in New York! I thought they were going to ship all the Jews out there, and I didn’t want to go!”
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If I Had Alzheimer’s, What Would Be The Last Thing I’d Remember?
My only significant experience with Alzheimer’s Disease was my cousins’ grandmother, who developed it sometime in the early 80s.
When I saw her for the last time in 1989, she and I sat on matching bar stools while she discussed the mess of menstruation. It was this continuous loop about the blood and leaking maxipads and whether I was old enough to have started mine (I was 24).
I nodded, imagining what Steve Reich might have done with this sample.
Over the last couple of years I have been under a lot of stress, and I find myself forgetting things, often within an instant of thinking them. I know this isn’t unusual—if nothing else, I have way more stuff in my brain now than I did, say, at 14. And there seems to be an obsession about this forgetfulness, from video games designed to sharpen older minds to first-person descriptions in The New York Times to study after study touting coffee and exercise as crucial memory boosters.
Nevertheless, certain stories, anecdotes, phone numbers repeat in my brain continually, even as I forget why I am standing in my kitchen holding a crumpled plastic bag.
This has made me wonder: If I were to develop Alzheimer’s and my memories and sense of self started to peel away like so many layers of an onion (obvious metaphor, albeit fitting), which memories would be the last to remain? What would be my parallel to menstruation and bleeding?
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