I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia by Su Meck

what I could do simply didn’t occur to me, and even if it did, the idea may have terrified me.
    My mom wanted desperately to help out somehow, as well as give Jim a break. But my younger brother, Mark, was still living at home and was not yet driving. Mom felt like she couldn’t very well desert him to come to Fort Worth to look after me. Instead it was decided that Jim would drive Benjamin, Patrick, and me to Houston to stay with my parents for a week. My parents now feel incredibly guilty about how little they understood of my new reality. My mom says that all she really knew was that I had this head injury and that I had trouble remembering things. The letters I sent her looked as if a first grader had written them, “all phonetic misspellings and shaky script on lined paper,” but still she and my dad were not overly concerned.
    It is highly unlikely that I in fact recognized either of my parents when I climbed out of the car in their driveway. But because Jim had prepared me for this particular reunion, I was able to greetthem both with a sort of affection and warmth. Even so, my parents say that they noticed immediately how much I had changed. They had known me as the family troublemaker, loud, defiant, and stubborn. Now my personality was completely different. My dad was surprised at how cooperative and friendly I appeared, nothing like the person I had been even a few months earlier.
    Mom thinks it likely that I woke up every morning that week in Houston unsure of where I was or why I was there. I must have been terribly confused to be yet again in a new, unfamiliar place, with unfamiliar people. But Mom thinks I would eventually hear the recognizable sounds of Benjamin and Patrick, and then I would slowly find my bearings, and greet my parents as if nothing was amiss.
    Not that everything went smoothly that week. Mom remembers taking me to a fancy luncheon and fashion show at a ritzy yacht club in the upscale Houston suburb of Clear Lake. There were white linen tablecloths on the tables, and waiters in tuxedos. The only person I vaguely knew at this affair was my mother, but she recalls that I “did a good job of making conversation and acting normal.” In the car afterward as we were driving home, Mom claims I looked at her and said, “That’s the dumbest thing I have ever done.” Mom thinks I had no clue as to what had just happened. Or why. Why on earth had we gone to this place and eaten this meal? After all, it is entirely possible that since leaving the hospital I had never eaten anywhere except at a table in a house.
    My dad remembers something else peculiar about that visit. I wouldn’t even enter the backyard, because of the pool. I was absolutely petrified of that pool. He and my mom found that surprising, since I had always been a strong swimmer and loved the water.I had even been a lifeguard as a teenager. Once again, they seemed not to understand the extent of my impairment. Nobody could comprehend that I was a different person, a new person, just observing and learning stuff as I went along. I seriously doubt I even understood my own fear of my parents’ pool.
    Because I was so deathly afraid of the pool out back, and wouldn’t go near it, we usually spent the hottest part of the day with the boys in the second-floor family game room playing with toys that had belonged to us Miller kids years before. One afternoon I walked over to the piano and sat down. It was the same piano that I had learned to play on as a child. I placed my fingers on the keyboard and began playing Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.” Mom says I played it nearly flawlessly from start to finish. From memory.
    When I was through, I turned to Mom and asked, “What was that? Where did that come from?” Mom told me that “The Entertainer” was a song that I had learned for a recital as a child. I was not able to ever repeat that performance. It was just gone. A kind of doorway had been opened momentarily, and then