What Writing Does to Memory
On going back fifty years and finding someone you forgot was still there
by G.A. Thompson
It starts with a title.
Not an idea, not a plan — a title. The words arrive on their own, usually while I am driving or not thinking about anything in particular, and a couple of days later the subject follows, and after that everything else, in no particular order and on no particular schedule. It is not a linear process. I have learned not to expect one.
That is how A Magnificent Ride to Nowhere began. That is how this essay began. The title came first, and the subject came later, and what came after that surprised me completely.
I am sitting at a desk in Goldendale, Washington, with a German Shepherd named Brin asleep on the floor and fifty years of road behind me, and I am trying to write about motorcycles.
That is what I think I am doing. A travelogue. Roads I have known, distances I have negotiated, the particular American light you only see from the seat of a moving motorcycle. I have ridden them for most of my life — across deserts and mountain passes and Missouri snow and the salt flats of Utah — and I think that story is worth telling. I think I know what the book is about.
I do not know what the book is about.
I had grown up in a Navy household. My father was career military, which meant the shape of our lives was decided by an institution every day of our lives. I had never chosen where I lived, what schools I attended, where we vacationed. By the time I graduated high school I had changed schools twenty-two times. I wanted nothing to do with the military. I wanted to stay in one place, to know my neighbors, to sleep in the same bed for more than a year.
I had graduated high school, earned an AAS in electronics engineering, and landed a good job — a well-paying job — with Western Electric in Broomfield, north of Denver. I was living in Boulder with a buddy from high school who was attending the university. By any reasonable measure I had done everything right. I had been out of my father's world and into my own independent life for maybe five months.
And then my roommate John destroyed the transmission in my car.
He said it the way people say things they have already accepted — flatly, as a fact, as something that had already happened and therefore could not be argued with. He had kept it in low gear the entire thirty miles back from Denver because he thought it had more power that way. By the time he pulled into the apartment complex, the transmission was cooked.
I had to get to work that evening. I had no car. John offered me his motorcycle — a small Suzuki 350 — and gave me five minutes of instruction in the parking lot. Right hand throttle, left hand clutch, right foot rear brake, left foot shifter. I managed a hundred feet without falling over. He said I was good to go. I rode it to work that night in the dark, every muscle tensed, and rode it home in sunlight the next morning slightly less terrified. A week later I had achieved the basic competence of a man who needed to get somewhere and had no other way to do it.
I still needed a car. I found a BMW 2002 I liked, put a down payment on it, and spent two days feeling like a man who had his life in order.
Then the draft notice arrived.
I returned the down payment, walked to a McDonald's two blocks away, and sat outside with a burger that tasted like compressed regret. I was going to die in Vietnam. I was reasonably certain of this. I had four weeks to report, and I knew the one thing I needed to do with them: say goodbye to my grandparents. They lived in Escondido, California — 1,200 miles away — in a house with an orange orchard that had been the one fixed point in a childhood that never stayed anywhere long enough to put down roots. I couldn't justify buying a car I would own for a month. I still had John's motorcycle, and I hadn't crashed it yet, which seemed like sufficient qualification for a longer journey.
I bought a Yamaha 350 and rode it to Escondido — across the Continental Divide, through the Utah desert, into the Mojave — alone, for the first time. The first truly unscripted decision of my life.
It would not be the last.
What writing does to memory is this: it goes looking for a fact and comes back with a feeling.
A memory is never just a fact. A memory is a fact with a feeling attached to it, and the feeling has been stored in the dark for fifty years accumulating interest, and when you go back for the fact you get both. You get the road and you get the person who rode it. You get the transmission and you get the eighteen-year-old standing next to it. You get the specific quality of that afternoon light in Boulder and the specific quality of understanding, for the first time, that you were on your own and had no idea what that meant.
I had not expected to feel that. I had expected to remember it.
There is a difference, and the difference is everything.
When you remember something, you are the person you are now, looking at the person you were then. There is distance. There is perspective. You can be generous with your younger self, or critical, or simply curious, the way you might be curious about a photograph of someone you used to know.
When you feel something, the distance collapses. You are both people at once. You are sitting at a desk in Goldendale, seventy-three years old, with a German Shepherd asleep on the floor and fifty years of road behind you, and you are also standing in a Boulder apartment at eighteen, and John is telling you about the transmission, and you feel — not remember, feel — how young you were. How unprepared. How genuinely, almost completely unequipped for the size of the world that had just opened its door.
That feeling does not fit inside a travelogue.
So the travelogue became a memoir.
I did not understand, when I sat down to write A Magnificent Ride to Nowhere, that I was about to excavate something I hadn't known was buried.
Writing about my father — about the rides we never took together, the conversations we never had, the particular quality of his silences — I began to see something I had spent seventy years not seeing. I had grown up in an emotionally sterile environment. Not a cruel one. Not a loud one. Simply one where emotional needs were not acknowledged, not discussed, not modeled, and not met — not because anyone was trying to damage me, but because no one in the house knew how. My father had likely inherited the same silence from his own father. You cannot spend what you do not have.
I had not known this until I wrote the book. The memoir revealed it to me the way excavation reveals a foundation: slowly, and then all at once, and then you cannot look at the structure above it the same way again.
And once I saw it, I could not unfind it. I began to look back at the decisions I had made over fifty years — the rides undertaken at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, the woman whose smile rearranged a waiting room and whom I let walk away without a word — and I recognized a pattern I had never been able to name. My decisions had been technically sound and humanly wrong. I had needed a catastrophe — a smoked transmission, a draft notice — just to give myself permission to visit my own grandparents, because in the household where I learned to think, wanting something was not a sufficient reason to act on it.
That discovery did not fit inside a memoir.
It was too large. It asked questions the memoir could not answer. It sat in the chest and would not be filed away, because acknowledging it was not the same as understanding it.
So I wrote another book.
I started writing The Road Inward to understand my feelings about my father — how his silence, and the silence of that household, had shaped the choices I made for the next fifty years. What happened during that writing was a phenomenon. Memories and feelings surfaced that I had no name for and no room to hold. The excavation went deeper than I had intended, and what it found was not just the past but the architecture of the past — the specific way a childhood without emotional attunement builds a mind that reasons brilliantly and feels blindly, that constructs perfect rational cases for decisions that are, at their core, acts of retreat.
I had to write that book for my own understanding. Not a chapter. Not an essay. A complete book, months of research, because the question deserved more than a paragraph — and so did she.
She is the woman on the bench in A Bench on the Moon.
Once The Road Inward was done — once I had done the forensic work, traced the silence back to its source, understood what it had cost me and why — I felt compelled to write the book I had actually been moving toward all along. Not an explanation. A conversation. A direct address to the woman I had let walk away, in the one place quiet enough to say what needed to be said honestly: a bench on the moon, built from lunar dust and imagination, where the gravity of everything I had carried for fifty years wouldn't keep me pinned to the floor.
I wrote an entire book to figure out why I let her go. And then I wrote another book to finally talk to her.
That is what writing does. It does not stay where you put it. You go in looking for roads and distances and the American West, and it finds something else — something older, something that has been waiting in the dark with the lights off, patient as a rock on the moon. And once it finds it, you cannot unfind it. The feeling does not fit inside the book you planned to write, and it will not be filed away once you have acknowledged it, because acknowledging it is not the same as resolving it.
So you write another one.
He is still there when I go back. The eighteen-year-old standing next to the dead car, five months into the first independent life he had ever lived, pretending to be an adult while everything arrived at once.
He was not ready.
Neither was I, fifty years later, sitting down to write what I thought was a travelogue.
The travelogue became a memoir. The memoir cracked something open that I hadn't known was sealed. The cracking open became a forensic audit of the silence, of the father, of fifty years of decisions made without the data that mattered most. The audit became a letter to a woman who never knew she was being written to.
I did not plan any of this. I planned to write one book about motorcycles.
But that is not how it works. Each book created an obligation the one before it could not meet. The writing kept finding something the current book could not hold. You do not decide to write the next book. The writing decides for you.
That is what writing does to memory. It does not preserve it. It does not clarify it. It breaks it open, and what comes out is not information but feeling, and feeling demands more than a single book can hold.
So you write another one.
And then another.
And somewhere along the way you stop calling it a problem and start calling it what it is.
A Magnificent Ride to Nowhere, The Road Inward, and A Bench on the Moon — The Motorcycle Trilogy — are available Amazon
G.A. Thompson is a writer and Army veteran living on five wooded acres in Goldendale, Washington, with a German Shepherd named Brin who has never read a word he's written and loves him anyway.