“I forgot about that”

During my last 24 hours in Zagreb, while hanging out with Petar at various cafés, one topic that came up was Croatian basketball stars over the years.

Of course we talked about Toni Kukoc and the late Drazen Petrovic (partly due to the strange coincidence of walking right past Petrovic’s coach on the street on the way to dinner). Then Petar mentioned Dino Radja, and my thought and perhaps also my utterance was “oh yeah, I forgot about Radja.”

I’ve often wondered what it really means when we say that. If Petar had mentioned Jojo White or Cornbread Maxwell or Sarunas Marciulonis (and he did mention Arvidas Sabonis), in none of these cases would I have said “I forgot about him,” even though I have perhaps literally not thought of any of these other players in 5 or more years.

Somehow, Radja had slipped into a deeper, less easily accessible layer of memory. Obviously I didn’t forget him completely– a clear picture of Radja’s appearance came before my mind as soon as Petar mentioned him.

There’s probably some neurological meaning of this as well, of course. But in purely phenomenological terms, there seems to be a layer of memory that requires an impact from outside to be accessed.

One of my brothers, the one just a younger than I am, has an especial talent for doing this to me all the time. His active childhood memories seem to coincide to a strange degree with y own more deeply buried memories, so I’m always being amused by the stuff he dredges up, hopelessly lost to my recollection if not for him.