A Ticket Stub

Published May 8, 2007

By Elias Altman

I am an archaeologist and archivist of my own life. I obsessively save all my graded papers, school notebooks, and movie ticket stubs. One summer, I even hand-wrote letters to the two girls I had crushes on at boarding school using carbon copies.

It is comforting to have proof of a memory: some physical remnant from an occurrence that now only resides in the mind. I collect these little mementos because I am afraid that I will lose what they signify. I keep everything hoping that I will lose nothing.

I am not sure to what I should attribute this habit: a gatherer instinct, Holden Caulfield nostalgia, wild insecurity. Regardless of the cause though the effect is that I preserve memories at all costs.

The poet Philip Larkin described his drive to compose verse by saying, “the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art.” At the core of creativity is an impulse to protect a fleeting moment or an emotion.

In addition to the physical act of archiving relics from my own life, I photograph and write because of this impulse. Those two arts record a particular moment in time, a decisive moment, and they become personal and public memorials. It’s certainly one of the reasons I was so excited to start The Water Tower with Hazel.

The process of memory—how and why events come to be remembered— is intricately complex. We often recall details from a day ten years ago without knowing why. Why would this image return to us and
not another?

I know little about formal psychology, but I think we could devise a calculus of memory to understand why some events are remembered and others not. In this way, we could find all the memory-variables and establish the different combinations of each that contribute to the birth and maintenance of a memory: setting, subsequent influence, etc.

However, there would always be something missing from this system of classification. It would be a fruitful scientific exercise, but there would always be another leaf to turn over. Memory might be better left to poets rather than physicians.

My current interest in memories is, in large part, due to the fact that I am graduating. The past four years will soon begin to be pickled, changed, and forgotten. I am ready to move on, but it does not change the fact college will soon be something I can only joke about with my friends, but can never return to.

I have many memories that seem very college to me: finishing a paper on jazz literature in a haze of smoke that I thought authenticated my writing or magically climbing to the top of Ira Allen (also as the sun came up) with three friends.

But one sticks out even more. I had just worked all day on two papers. I ran up to campus to turn them both in at 5 pm. Then, I sprinted back to my house to get dressed in nice clothes to see a performance of Hamlet. I was sure my girlfriend was going to be late, but she pulled alongside my house and slid over to the passenger seat, “You drive. We’ll get there quicker.” We drove off with the windows down.

It’s a small moment – maybe a little cliché and pretentious – but as we sped away from my house, and she put her hand lightly on my neck, I knew that it was the birth of a memory. I knew right then that I would never forget that moment. I suddenly got very sad; this would all be over soon: the frenzied fun of rushing to a play, this feeling of inevitability, my love for this girl, college.

I am not sure why I felt this way; I don’t think my calculus of memory could tell me either. It’s just that when you know that you’ll miss something even before it’s gone, you can’t forget it, even without a ticket stub.

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