Today when I was playing a hug-and-snuggle game with Patches I was struck with a thought: He doesn’t get to remember today. He’s only two and this joyful experience will forever be lost to him. And in another year he will have grown so much that he’ll be a completely different person. Right now is the only chance I will ever have to enjoy two year old Patches.
5 thoughts on “Two Year Old Patches”
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He won’t necessarily remember that particular moment, but I have little doubt that the feeling of love will persist anyway. The brain is a strange thing, and I don’t think that anything we ever feel goes away completely – even though we may not be able to call up the memories anymore.
Just a rephrase of the previous statement. At this stage, he is unable to store long-term memories, but it is possible to influence behavior and personality. There are some neurons that are getting hard-coded right now.
This is…sort of tangentially related, but I just read Fire and Hemlock, by Diana Wynne Jones. It has a lot about memories and why we remember things we want to remember, even if all we remember is a feeling.
It’s young adult fantasy, though this one’s a bit older. If you don’t know DWJ, please, please, please read some, they are fantastic for reading to 7 or 8 year olds.
Don’t bet on it. My memory goes back to before I was a year old. He might remember today… or another day just like it… for the rest of his life.
Indeed. It’s amazing what the brain codes or discards – I can forget what I had for breakfast last week, but I can remember eating an insect at the age of 3 or 4, or thereabouts. I’ve probably got memories from when I was two, though I’ll probably not recognize them as anything coherent – sense-impressions or images, but not much more than that.