A Lifelong Memory

There is one component of a relationship I have never been able to understand. It is the lifelong memory of that first love, or the memory of any singular love for that matter, a memory that one can never shake.

When I was in eighth grade, I met a six-year-old girl to whom I was so attracted, I could not get her out of my mind until well into college. We knew each other for less than three days and never saw each other after that first and last time together.

As an adult, I have suffered the same experience and she still floats in and out of my mind daily (no, not the six-year-old; I finally got over that).

I don't know if women have these memories, but certainly among men, if not universal, these memories are certainly very, very common.

I am reminded of that by a passage in Ron Powers' very, very good biography of Mark Twain, c. 2005. Since I can't say it any better than Powers has already said it, here is that passage from that biography:

The young girl with plaited tails and white frock was named Laura Wright. She floated into Sam’s enchanted vision, as he recalled it, on a spring night in 1858 on the New Orleans waterfront, and transported him to a forty-eight-hour tour of heaven that he re-created in his mind, compulsively, for the rest of his life. He paid for this interlude with a session in Hell less than a month afterward, which he also revisited, faithfully. The two episodes resonate eerily with one another. Each involved the same steamboat; a permanent parting; deep love interrupted at the point of its discovery. Each shaped his literature, and his views of mankind, fate, and God. Fourteen-year-old Laura Wright was the daughter of a Warsaw, Missouri, judge who had allowed her to go down to New Orleans on her first trip away home, accompanied by her uncle, William C. Youngblood, one of the pilots of the sprawling freight steamer John J. Roe. Sam knew the Roe and all her officers very well and was delighted to find it in the adjoining slip when, on the evening of May 16, the Pennsylvania, the fast packet on which he was then working, put into port at New Orleans. Sam jumped onto the Roe’s deck from a rail of this boat, and began shaking hands with old friends. The, the young girl appeared, almost chimerically. Sam moved toward her and wangled an introduction. She became his “instantly elected sweetheart out of the remotenesses of interior Missouri” for a brief idyll that enlarged itself in his imagination at least until four years before his death.

Mark Twain was in the presence of Laura Wright on only two occasions. After their parting, they continued to correspond but that ended fairly soon.

Laura Wright eventually married. Mark Twain never saw her after those two initial visits.

But he was never able to get over her, not until at least four years before his death, according to Ron Powers, as noted above.