My memory has always frustrated me. Reaching into my past is like playing that carnival game where you manoeuvre a metal claw around a glass chamber filled with trinkets and toys, trying, almost always in vain, to drag out a treasure. When one of my kids asks me what I was like at their age or how I navigated some challenge or milestone they are facing, I often draw a blank. Or I salvage a sliver of memory, a single faded frame of film. My wife, by contrast, is always quick with a story; her memory, or so it seems to me, is a well-stocked and meticulously catalogued library of experiences. How I wish for the same easy familiarity with the past, not only because I worry what will become of my memory in later life, but because I worry that even today it is damaging my most intimate possession,
