Memories Are Made Of.....

It is a recent trend in the media
for adverts for popular products
to talk about 'making memories',
as if families did not do this before,
whether with or without the assistance
of the technologies of their day.

How much is the spread this phrase
a reaction against the new awareness of dementia?
It seems that way to me, much more than
it is about the unity of family, when previously
memory was a given, regardless of how generous,
how mean, or merely banal, the events were,
that created the memory of family.

Back then a memory of an unhappy family
was better then having no recollection
of family at all, and whoever in the family
got away with the most wrong doing,
buried that in how family was misremembered
and made the greatest social capital they could
out of what would otherwise have been,
as an adult, memories of a misery laden childhood.