Memory

Last spring, my mom was telling my eldest daughter about the first hockey game she ever took me to. The story was a good one, and took a good ten minutes, filled with twist and turns, and just enough making fun of me to delight my daughter.

Problem was, about 75% of it was wrong.

Not problematically wrong. Not maliciously wrong. I didn’t spend the time categorically denying every moment. I just realized as she remembered the Avalanche when it was the Rockies, when she mistook which team’s player had been sent through the glass, and more… that her memory was failing her. I’d heard the story too many times correctly told to not worry about what I was hearing.

It took my sister and I almost a year to convince her something has been amiss, but we finally got her in to see the doc this last month. While the news she’s facing is scary, it is also unexpectedly recoverable. We’ll see which turn things take as we go, but the prospect of her having some of those memories back is hope-inducing, in the least.

So many of my first recollections of relatives and friends over the years are of something sports-related, and even my five-foot-nothing mother is no exception. She did take me to my first hockey game, a Rockies victory over the Islanders in which one of the New York forwards ended up checked through the glass and into some nice little old lady’s lap. I’ve been a rabid hockey fan ever since.

She squeezed my hand while we both tried not to choke up taking my grandpa to his first major league baseball game in Denver two years before he passed. We narrowly held it together until he started to cry, and then we were all simply puddles. The Rockies won that day as well. He’d taken us to so many Denver Bears games that it was something to see that first MLB season in Mile High Stadium.

She showed me it was okay to add onto your allegiances when she and my stepdad made a lengthy move to the Phoenix area (she also loves PHNX), and we suddenly had debates over whether she’d be rooting for the Broncos or Cardinals, Avalanche or Coyotes. She was especially torn about the Diamondbacks after they won a World Series, and still follows them regularly… when she remembers.

She’s the reason I can yell loud enough to make people turn around – which was embarrassing at soccer games – but also the reason I have the presence of mind to know that people don’t want to hear me keep bellowing.

And while she wasn’t the person that taught me football, basketball, baseball, or soccer, she did teach me how to bowl, how to play croquet, and how to talk about all of the parts of a badminton game without giggling. So in ways, her memories of sports are mine, because they’re the first recollections I remember hearing. I know it was Rockies Hockey and who we were playing more because of her constant reiterations of the story, not because my 13-year old self was actually paying close enough attention.

So now that her memories are slipping, I’m inspired to make a few more with her while we have the opportunity. So even if the particulars are a little slippery for her, there are a few more of these moments that will hopefully stick with us all. Inspired to take each of my football-, baseball-, and hockey-loving kids to games that actually appeal to their favorites on that list. To leverage the reigning Stanley Cup Champs, the current leaders in the NBA Western Conference, one of the proudest organizations in football, and one of the prettiest ballparks in the Majors to help me create the memories and moments that we will all tell stories about as the years go along. We have these opportunities to make something indelible about something we all can share.

Whatever sport is rattling your cage these days, see if you can bring along one of your most important people for the ride. The memories you share can be some of the most important of your life.