Recently I’ve been frustrated by a realization I’ve had. From my entire college career — spanning four years of my young adult life — I have only scattered, fragmentary memories. People, places, events.
People… but strangely, few names.
Had I been born slightly later, I could reminisce over photos on my social media accounts, laugh as old status updates pop into my “Memories” on Facebook — “so-and-so posted this on your feed five years ago”. Scroll through photos on Instagram… with each face neatly tagged with a name.
But my time at college predated that. I graduated the year MySpace was started — and nothing is left of my tacky customized MySpace profile but a memory of Tom’s goofy smile.
Smartphones were years away. I didn’t have a digital camera.
My neglected and margin-doodled college notebooks presumably lie buried in some landfill in my old hometown.
I talked to my friends and classmates on AOL Instant Messenger, now defunct, and my college email account, long since purged. Screen names, email addresses, signature lines all lost to the digital void.
In CSC116 (Intro to Programming in Java), I sat at the back of the lecture hall, center section, in Withers Hall with a few other guys. I recall a mental image of both of them: one with a brown beard and green cloth jacket, the other a blond young man who often showed up in t-shirt.
Full of the overconfidence and braggadocio of youth, we laughed and wisecracked our way through each lecture. We had been coding for years. We knew object-oriented programming concepts.
One of the guys joked about naming a Queue object “fuh“. When anyone asked what that object was, he would simply shrug and say, “Fuh Queue.”
I can’t remember either of their names.
In PY205L (First Year Physics for Engineers, Laboratory section) I was partnered with a young woman about halfway through the semester. We did the labs together: I ran the procedure and she would gather the data, or vice-versa.
She was cute, with dirty blonde or light brown hair. She often wore a leather jacket.
(And yes, at the risk of sounding shallow, I’ve always been a fool for a pretty little brunette.)
We lived in the same building. After the last lab class of the semester, I walked her back to her dorm. I would love to have known her better, but instead of asking about her plans for next semester, I said something like “I guess I won’t see you again, so have a nice life.”
(Yeah… that was, and is, my level of competence with women.)
I remember her hair, her eyes… oddly enough, her wrists. I remember the ancient Macintosh computers we’d use to collect data. I remember the smooth matte black surface of the laboratory desk in the far corner where we worked together.
I can’t remember her name.
In ECE212 (Fundamentals of Logic Design), Dr. Byrd assigned us to homework groups to complete our assignments. There were four of us, and we met regularly in the study lounge on the first floor of Bragaw Hall.
The course could just as correctly have been called “All About How Computers Work”, from the level of transistors, to logic gates and registers, to the von Neumann architecture.
In one assignment, we learned how to program a simulated computer called the LC-2 (the “little computer” – a toy computer for engineering students) using its assembly language.
The assignment also had us carry out a compiler optimization (by hand, of course — we were the compiler) by marking unused dependencies and removing them. Of course, we found that this optimization removed the last instruction in the program (which had no dependencies)… and when iterated, removed all other instructions in the program.
(The fairly simple lesson: the exit instruction has to be pinned and not optimized away.)
The four of us sat at a table doing several iterations of this optimization by hand before realizing what was happening.
I can’t remember any of their names.
It’s difficult even to articulate the frustration I feel at being able to recall the minutiae of these memories, but nothing so useful as the names of the people I was with.
Those days are now twenty years in the past. As I grow older, I fear that my memories will grow even more indistinct, more unreliable. I’ve lost the names… will I lose the faces, the sights and sounds? Was I ever really on that campus? Did I actually eat at the dining hall? Walk the library stacks? Trudge through the rain along the brick sidewalks to class?
Was any of it real, or is it all a fiction created by my mind, because the horror of a memory gap is too great to face?
In an age where data retention is the default, where everything is remembered and nothing is ever forgotten — somehow I feel that I have forgotten all the things that matter from my college life.
Somehow I’ve forgotten the names. All the handles to the people with whom I shared four increasingly obscure years of my youth.
So to all my old mates who attended NCSU in the first years of the 21st century:
If you have a vague, half-remembered mental image of an awkward dark-haired four-eyes with a scraggly goatee that desperately needed to be shaved clean — oh, yeah, that guy! — but you just can’t place his name… sigh… sadly, you’re not alone.
(Also, that was me. Hi.)
pmcoltrane 