Off The Cuff Archive

Over the weekend, when I called my sister to wish her happy birthday, she and I began to reminisce, and discovered a great difference in the way our memories function. My memories of life are a great blur, spinning around in the back of my mind constantly out of focus. If prompted, I can perhaps pull up an image, or a single brief moment, maybe, but I don’t normally access them regularly on my own. I can remember how I felt about the experience more than the specifics of the situation.

 My sister (I’ve noted this about my cousin as well) stores vivid, detailed memories--and lots of them. I’ve spent a lot of my life making memories with both my sister and my cousin, and I truly wish I shared their capability to relive those moments in their minds 20, 30, almost 40 years later.

 Nobody remembers everything, and I believe we all suffer from “selective memory.” No matter what it is we remember, the way we share and relate those memories now is still by choice, and attitude, and audience.

Most people look to a newspaper for a recording of current events. They look to the newspaper to see what’s happening now, or just last week. News itself mandates the context of the here and now--what’s happening now, what’s developing now, current trends, current events.

Last week’s paper is old news. Almost forgotten, last week’s newspapers are trash, in the can, the recycling bin, the flower bed as mulch. Last week’s paper lines the litter box. Right?

 Well, for some people, last week’s news, when it gets old, becomes history. Last week’s issue, and the one before that, and the one before that--they’re all, literally, history now. Past issues of The Calhoun Chronicle/Grantsville News are recorded memories of our community.

 What we include in this week’s issue is this week’s record of tomorrow’s history. Fifty years from now, historians will read these pages to make educated assumptions about who we were.