By DAVID IZRAELEVITZ
Los Alamos

For some strange reason, I have an attachment to commemorative coffee mugs. My collection includes a mug that one of my kids bought me at his Boy Scout troop fundraiser, one that commemorates the demise of an old research group, another that I drank coffee from in grad school. I have a mug from my Tae Kwon Do class to remind me not to block a kick with your thumb, and a mug that my Little painted for me twenty-something years ago when I was a Big Brother.

I would accumulate these mugs at my home office bookcase, displacing textbooks on thermodynamics or material science that I had also kept for decades, because knowledge collected at the cost of thousands of dollars is easier to donate away than memories. Or maybe my memory of martensite vs. other forms of iron, or steel, or whatever it was, part of many superfluous curricular memories one accumulates as an engineering undergraduate, are so much more inconsequential after a few years than reminiscences about a fourth-grader and the art of building card castles.

I have a terrible memory, or more specifically, a terrible useful memory. I remember experiential snippets, like my father wiping my dirty lips with his saliva-wetted thumb when I was three or four.  On the other hand, I often have to write down what I just committed to doing after a meeting. I can remember old phone numbers, but forget the names of people I just met. I remember the first time I saw my wife and forget what it was that she just asked me to get at the supermarket.

I take comfort in what Albert Einstein wrote, something to the effect of, “Never memorize something that you can look up,” I agree with the sentiment. Martensite has a Wikipedia entry; my time with little Eric building card castles does not.

I also take comfort in a science fiction story about someone whose ability to remember was so perfect, that every slight received, every stubbed toe, every moment of doubt, kept echoing in their mind unattenuated. There are times when it is better to forget, and like some geological process, allow time to layer new experiences, burying the old.  But also like a beautiful golden temple that is slowly buried under sand, some things are worth digging back up. That is what these mugs mean to me. They are the tip-top of a golden cupola that permit me to uncover for the moment, maybe until buried again for years, the carved walls and stately columns hidden below.

We turned my old office into an exercise room, a consequence of our stay-at-home habits during COVID. Many books went to the donate pile, some papers to recycling or shredder, and the mugs received one last cycle through the dishwasher. They then sat on our kitchen counter, waiting for their final destiny at Casa Mesita. Let’s add them to the donation pile, I said, in a moment of maturity or weakness.

But later I picked up the cup-filled shopping bag, each rattling with an excited call of gratitude, and took them all back upstairs. They now live in a bedroom closet where they whisper their brief moment of glory to each other. I hope to hear them on occasion; they still have something to say to me.