Staying Mad Forever

A HIGH SCHOOL CLASSMATE of mine, a very perceptive lady with whom I became close friends long after we gradatued, is now deceased, but will remain enshrined in my memory forever, or as long as I live. Her humor and wisdom educated and inspired me. Among her most percipient remarks was: "When a woman gets mad at you, she stays mad forever."I readily agreed with that astute observation, and added a corollary. When a human being, male or female, gets mad at you, he or she remains mad forever. What actually happens, most likely, is that people have memories, good ones. Conssciously or not, our brains are like tape recorders,and we pretty much remember everything that happens to do, everything that we do and experience. There is no reason to believe that any behavior fundamental to human existence is reserved exclusively to either gender. For instance,men are as capable of changing their minds, of being "fickle", as women.I have what seems to me en extraordianry memory, Until quite recently I could have told you the name and seating location within the classroom of every student in my first grade class. Now, however, my memory is fading with age, but is still geed enough. Whenever I make a stupid mistake,or treat someone with less than acceptable behavior, which I hope is not often, I seriously hope that he or she will forget or has already forgotten about the incident. Likely they have not. Since people are not always the best at forgiving, memory loss can be a good expedient to maintaining friendships, The old cliche about first impressions has merit. We never havea second chance to make one. Memory, hard at work. Our selective memories give us the comfort of filtering out the worst mamories, and preserving those which do not distress us. Over time, events which frighten, horrify, or distress us when they occur are smoothed out by our filtering device, our past becomes less the traumatic scenario it once was, and our previous lives, up to and including yesterday, became somewhat tolerable, less regrettable. More than ffty years after I graduated from high school, my memories of school, all twelve years of my public education, have taken on a warm, fuzzy feeling, But when I dig deeper, the warm fuzziness blurs into a composite of fear, apprehension, worry, about assignments due, bullies lurking, grades about to be given or already given, the whole business of hidng report cards from parents. I only started needing to hide mine late in high school, when the classes became so boring for me that I stopped paying attention, preferring to day dream about girls, science fiction books, or baseball. The older we get, the more memories we accumlulate, and the more important our filtering and editing mechanism becomes, serving us well. Most of us in old age can and do look back on our long lives with a positive attitude, including even warmly remembering the hard times, and our resolution of them, whatever it may have been. When we stay mad at somebody long enough, we might as well drop the anger and simply decide that we do not like the person we're mad at, which is waht we tend to do. Or, we do the math. We total up the pros and cons of the person and their treatment of us, and turn our total into our lasting attitude. We must do something with our anger, process it somehow, lest it eats at us and psychologically damages us. The best solution comes from people like Jesus, who tells us to wipe the slate clean, to forgive everybody for everything, without reservation. If only human nature worked like that.