Can You Inherit A Memory?

There was once an airfield just east of Villisca. It was on the north side of the highway just west of the Nodaway River bridge as we traveled into town. I remember going to an air show there as a small child. I have a memory that one of the performers that day fell to his death, but I don't have a memory of seeing the actual fall.

"Have you ever remembered something that you couldn't remember, Anna, a memory that belongs to someone else, that isn't yours at all?" That is a question asked in the book I am currently reading. It made me wonder if it was possible - especially after reading this in my Mother's Diary from July 5, 1937: "Went to Red Oak. Arthur K. & Mary Jo went with us. Had a swell time. (Except) The parachute jumper got killed."

It makes me think I have made two memories into one - my own and my Mother's. She was the one who went to a July 4th celebration which included an air show. She was the one who saw a performer fall to his death, not me. Perhaps she told me about that while we were watching the air show at Villisca and it got incorporated into my memories as being something I witnessed.

When I read Mom's diary from her 17th year, I do remember her telling me some of the things she wrote about - the boys she dated, the plays put on at the school house, walking up to the neighbors to visit, herding the cows along the road so they could pasture the grass in the ditches, visiting the young man who got a head injury when a swing knocked him into Spring Lake, gathering moss at the rock quarry to take home for their big fish pool in the yard, and one she didn't record in her diary - she and Aunt Lois climbing up on the roof of the barn. So, in some ways, her memories did become my memories - at least my memories of her youth.

It sounds like she had more fun at seventeen than I did - dances, parties, movies, several boy friends - but perhaps it seems that way to me now because she didn't tie herself down to one guy by going steady at seventeen as did I.

One thing she wrote about that I had never heard was going to Shenandoah to the Tom Mix Circus on June 11, 1936 - Grandpa Joe's 40th birthday. I remember seeing a Tom Mix movie or two as a youngster - Tom and his famous trick horse, Tony, but I had no idea his first love was the circus and that he had his own circus and wild west show for a brief time or that my Mom had seen him.

Mom also mentioned going to see the Hatcher Players tent show in her diary. (They quartered in New Market for twenty-one years.)  I do remember the Hatcher Players, although by the time I saw them in the early '50's, they were known as the Sun Players. They advertised: "A new play every night, feature show, 'Twin Beds'. Good clean entertainment for the whole family with Toby and the Hill Billy Band direct from Nashville, Tenn. At the fairgrounds for one week. Admission 60 cents adult; 20 cents for children."

The Schaffner Players tent show replaced the Sun Players a few years later. I saw them at the Adams County Fair Grounds, too. I still remember the end of their 100+ years history when 'Toby' suffered a heart attack in 1962. There were a lot of double entendre jokes and it was fun.

There are many studies involving inherited memory. There was even a movie in 1988 - Altered States, with William Hurt, that delved into deep DNA memories and experiences. For myself, I'm a believer. I believe some of my Mother's memories live on within me. I can only hope some of mine live on in my children.