Title: The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past

Author: Nate DiMeo

Completed: Dec 2024 (Full list of books)

Overview: Such a great collection of stories. Many were familiar to me from all the episodes of the Memory Palace podcast I’ve heard over the years but it was wonderful to reexamine them. I even started reading a few of them to my 8 year old who has expressed zero interest in any other books I’ve been reading but was enthralled by the story of Betty Robinson. I also enjoyed hearing the stories about Nate’s life. He has a great way of telling stories.

I read this cover to cover but it certainly isn’t written or designed for that the be the only way. I expect this will be a book I go back to when I want short stories to read for ten-fifteen minutes. It’s definitely one of my favorite books of the year.

Highlights:

• “Yes sir! It’s going to rain candy from the sky.” And so it did. Baby Ruths, in red-white-and-blue wrappers tied with string and strung up with tiny parachutes, floated down through the sky over Pittsburgh. Drifted past office windows. Draftsmen looked up from their tables as something caught their eye. Then ran over to the window. White parachutes by the dozens. Kids in the streets below, looking up, eyes wide, hands outstretched, the best thing they’d ever seen. Traffic stopped on Liberty Avenue.
• The boy in the plane with Davis in Miami, who dropped candy on the crowd and just loved it. He loved it so much he became a pilot. He named his plane after his mother, Enola Gay, and dropped an atomic bomb over Hiroshima.
• But a life isn’t lived in a census, as it is not lived in a grave. Hercules lived his as a free man for fifteen years. He doesn’t owe history an accounting of his days. Hercules was free of George Washington; George Washington should never be free of Hercules.
• Carla never quit. You can go to YouTube and find a clip of her in a pink sequined leotard, doing a headstand atop an eighty-five-foot pole, with no net, as is the Wallenda way, from a TV special hosted by Steve Harvey. She is eighty-one years old.
• The Kodak camera put the means of production of those most vital of things—our own images, our own histories—into our own hands. The circular photos from those first years, of people at play and at work, of the streets where they walked, of the trees and buildings that shaded and sheltered them, of children who were young once, are taken by people figuring out, for the first time, what you could do with a camera. What it did to your life to have pieces of it on a wall, or in your wallet, or to be found one day and wondered over when you’re gone.
• It may be hard to think of butter art as fine art, but you are Iolanthe; you have not yet learned to see.
• They targeted hotels first, where more rooms meant more money. And they persuaded them to turn the idea of luxury quite literally upside down. Before the elevator, the best rooms were on the bottom floor. You didn’t have to walk up. Four flights of stairs? Stick the pauper in the penthouse. But the Otis brothers persuaded hotels it should be the other way around. The first floor is by the street, with hoi polloi and their noise and their sweat and their fruit carts stinking in the sun and, worse, their horses and the things horses do. Wasn’t a king’s throne supposed to be higher than his servants? Wasn’t a lord supposed to lord over? Why shouldn’t the wealthy traveler be above it all? And the hotels bit. They built high. And the wealthy travelers liked the view. And when it came time to build their next office building, or expand their shirtwaist factory, they built higher still. And they bought elevators from the Otis Elevator Company.
• The year is 1774. It is the eve of the Revolutionary War. The place is Plymouth, Massachusetts. They have recently organized a militia there. They have put up a liberty pole, which is essentially just that: a big wooden pole. But it is, of course, more than just that. It is a symbol of defiance against the Crown, a metaphoric middle finger, rising from the town green. The liberty pole tradition traces its roots to ancient Rome, where a group of senators celebrated the emperor’s assassination by sticking a red cap on top of a pole. The cap was the same type that was given to freed slaves to signal their new status; the senators, it seems, co-opted the cap to suggest that Rome, with Caesar’s death, had been similarly freed.
• To this day, historians debate whether Thomas Faunce’s memory, at ninety-five, was accurate. And whether that specific rock—or any rock, for that matter—played any particular role in the Pilgrims’ arrival. But it is clear that it didn’t hold any real significance, practical or sentimental, to the Pilgrims themselves, because they basically wrote everything down, and no one ever mentioned it.
• her all-wrong shoes, at the awkward way she crouches at the starting line (she hadn’t even known to crouch at the starting line). Mr. Price holds up his stopwatch and blows a whistle and Betty runs. It isn’t pretty, her form is ridiculous, but she is fast. She crosses the line 6.2 seconds after she started. It is one-tenth of a second faster than the women’s indoor world record.
• She was an overnight celebrity, and not just the new favorite all-American girl: She was a new kind of girl. An athlete. A role model. And then the summer ended and she went back to high school.
• Wasn’t it natural that a different person should have a different body? And when I read that, I find the image I have of her in my head starts to drift. There is something in her words that sounds like something anyone who has come to terms with aging, as best they can, might say. About living in a body that is changing, that can’t quite do what it used to, or at least not in the way it used to, and is realizing or wrestling with the notion that maybe the person they’re becoming won’t need that body to do all that, at least not in the same way, and maybe that’s okay.
• with the data he gathered he was able to convince the stewards of America’s best idea of his own best idea: The wilderness should be wild. He told them that a forest wasn’t a zoo, that not every fire should be prevented, that predators should be repopulated, that the trash-heap shows should be closed, that if we were going to set aside corners of the continent for nature, then they should be natural.
• He’d been piloting the Planter for months, moving Confederate soldiers and supplies up and down the coast. He knew where all the mines were around the channel out of Charleston, South Carolina. Hell, he’d been there when they’d laid them down. He could do it. He could. What if they just took the boat? It had started as a joke from one of the other enslaved men who worked on the Planter, but the joke stopped being funny.
• Robert Smalls was famous among the furious rebels and fearful slaveholders and Southerners who were looking at the enslaved in their midst, wondering which among them might just take a boat of their own or grab the whip or burn the house down.
• He returned home to Beaufort, where his mother had been born a slave. Where he had been born a slave in a cabin behind their master’s house. And then he bought that house. He bought the whole plantation with the money he’d gotten for taking the boat. He lived there with his family until his death in 1915.
• He was elected to the South Carolina legislature and made the conditions he had negotiated into state law. He went on to serve five terms in the United States Congress, where he fought to try to desegregate public transportation and the military; to stop the tax code from favoring the wealthy and punishing the poor; to give women the right to vote.
• She had dementia. Robert was the one to recognize her. She was the wife of the man who’d once owned him. Her husband had died some years before and here she was, confused. She said this was her home, but it was different somehow. So different now. Smalls took her in and she lived there comfortably until her death.
• When I was growing up, it had echoed with stories, endlessly repeated at big Italian family dinners, and during the tail ends of Christmases, with the dying embers and the embarrassing uncle passed out on the maroon velour chair. For new audiences, the stories were stretched and embellished; for close family they were invoked, compressed like Mandarin proverbs until they could be summoned by a couple of brushstrokes: “Dad and the Studebaker,” “Mom’s Broken Finger,” “Janice Through the Bathroom Window.”
• But then something popped up in my bloodwork. We got a call that said I had to go to the hospital as quickly as possible, where I was told I had nearly died. In fact, I had been nearly dying every day for quite some time.
• There are moments as good as any other—that it might just be that there were limits to delight, that the literal feeling of singing “Cecilia” to a sea of people who are singing it back to you in Central Park might in fact be no more pleasurable or invigorating or enriching than stealing home in a Little League game or, for that matter, laughing with your friends, or having a great kiss, or any number of life’s quotidian joys, these things that are happening all around us, all the time, if we just stopped to notice them as they happened and remember them when they were done. I set out to do that: to notice and to remember. And to remember, you need a story.
• Upon arriving in America, the boys enrolled at Princeton, from which they graduated first and second in their class, both with GPAs above 4.0, after which they were forever known in the family as the Smart Brother and the Dumb Brother.
• Once again, a Pilgrim-looking fellow arrives in another new world to live in accordance with his principles, with the assistance of friendly natives. In that story, the Narragansett didn’t just welcome Williams but gifted him prime real estate. It may not surprise you that this story isn’t entirely true, and that, as with the émigrés up in Plymouth, the tangible assistance he did receive from the people that were there when he arrived wasn’t entirely altruistic. The Narragansett who agreed to let him settle the land at the mouth of the river did so out of strategic necessity. They wanted a physical buffer between their lands and those of the Wampanoag,