“Hey diddle diddle,
the cat and the fiddle,
the cow jumped over the moon…”

And then what?

I sat there the other day trying to remember.

I knew the beginning. I could hear the rhythm in my head. These were words I had probably known since I was a child, yet somewhere between the cow and the moon, I had absolutely no idea what came next.

Funny thing, memory.

How can we remember something that happened thirty, forty, even fifty years ago with such clarity that we can still see the room, hear someone’s voice or remember exactly where we were standing? We can even remember the smells: the aroma of an apple pie baking in the oven, Grandma’s sauce simmering on the stove, or that unmistakable smell of new leather in our very first car. Suddenly, for just a moment, we’re right back there again.

And yet, we can’t remember what we walked upstairs to get.

Scientists have been asking versions of that question for decades.

One fascinating discovery is something researchers call the “reminiscence bump.” In a 2018 review, researchers Khadeeja Munawar, Sara K. Kuhn and Shamsul Haque examined 68 studies of memory and found that middle-aged and older adults tend to recall a surprisingly large number of personal memories from roughly the ages of 10 to 30.

Perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us.

Those are the years of so many firsts: first loves, first heartbreaks, first jobs, new friendships, leaving home, discovering who we are and, perhaps just as importantly, discovering who we aren’t and who we will never become.

Researchers have also discovered that emotion matters. In a 1995 study, neuroscientists Larry Cahill and James McGaugh found that emotionally arousing experiences were remembered more strongly than neutral ones, helping to explain why certain moments stay with us long after the ordinary details have faded.

Maybe that’s why I can’t tell you what I had for dinner on an ordinary Tuesday forty years ago, but I can tell you exactly where I was standing, what someone said to me, or even what I was wearing on a day that mattered, on a day that hurt, or on a day so special that all these years later, I can still feel it but can’t quite find the words to describe the enormity of it all.

Psychologists have also studied the remarkable power of a memory cue. Researchers Endel Tulving and Donald Thomson demonstrated decades ago that the right cue can help us retrieve information that, moments earlier, seemed inaccessible.

Sometimes we don’t remember something simply because we haven’t been given the right key to unlock it.

And sometimes that key consists of only three little words.

“Do you remember…?”

Someone says them and suddenly there we are.

Do you remember that summer, that teacher, the house we lived in, or that ridiculous thing we did? Almost before the question has been finished, a door opens.

A face appears, a voice returns, and a room we haven’t entered in fifty years suddenly has furniture again. One memory leads to another, and another, until something we hadn’t thought about in decades feels as though it happened yesterday.

Maybe that’s one of the loveliest things about growing older with people who have known us for a long time.

They hold some of the keys to our memories, and we hold some of theirs. Every once in a while, someone turns one.

Which brings me back to that cow jumping over the moon.

I couldn’t remember what came next. 

Until a friend reminded me.

“The little dog laughed to see such sport,
and the dish ran away with the spoon.”

“You, of all people,” they laughed. “The dog lover. How could you forget the dog?”

Good question. Apparently, even a lifelong love of dogs is no match for an elusive memory.

Funny thing, memory.

Sometimes it isn’t gone at all.
Sometimes it was just waiting for someone to say, “Do you remember?”