… is an old com­puter term for remov­ing all of the soft­ware from the hard­ware and start­ing over again. Back when we could rm -rf we would occa­sion­ally find that a sys­tem had got itself into a non-​recoverable state and need to be rebuilt from the ground up in order to func­tion again. Or on a hap­pier note when a project fin­ished we often wiped the soft­ware off of the hard­ware and repur­posed it for the next project.
While sys­tems have become much more resilient than they used to be, and rm -rf is rarely avail­able to the aver­age user, a com­pete wipe down of the buggy sys­tem using rm -rf’s newer rel­a­tive, reset to fac­tory set­tings, is still the only solu­tion to cer­tain prob­lems. My iPhone got into one of those states recently. Slow to load apps and data for sev­eral weeks it finally reached the point of being unable to load the App Store for updates.
Google has as many solu­tions for these sorts of prob­lems as there are ways of cre­at­ing them. Everything from killing the run­ning apps to fully eras­ing the phone’s mem­ory and rebuild­ing it from “like new.” It’s a fraught process. There is a fris­son of dread and hope. You will def­i­nitely start with the sim­plest least destruc­tive options but there’s always the ques­tion: What if you have to go all the way?
I found and tried a num­ber of folk reme­dies. Kill all the run­ning apps and then restart the phone. Tap any but­ton at the bot­tom of the App Store app 10 times to clear the cache — that worked for about 10 min­utes. Remove all of your net­work set­tings and reboot your WAP — okay so the WAP was lit­tle wedged, etc. In the end none of these worked. The last non destruc­tive option was a full backup and restore. And easy but lengthy process that could  leave the phone in exactly the same barely func­tion­ing state that I had started in. An hour and half later that’s exactly what happened.
So there I was — faced with the option of last resort. The nuke and pave. Leaving me with a blank phone with­out a sin­gle bit of the per­son­al­ity that I’d given it over the last two years. That at once won­der­ful and fright­en­ing prospect of a new start. There is dread. It’s a colos­sal has­sle. You lose every­thing. Every set­ting, every App, every bit of data. Your con­tacts, your text mes­sages, your fit­ness band data, your pho­tos of the dog act­ing idi­otic. All of it. It’s like los­ing your phone only with­out the cost of new hard­ware. A total PITA.
And yet, and yet. It is also an excit­ing prospect. The new, vir­gin ter­rain. All of the mis­cel­la­neous cruft and crap and use­less apps and pass­words for wi-​fi points in air­ports you’ll never visit again, and oop­sie pic­tures of your feet are gone. You get to start again with a sim­pler, cleaner, less over­whelm­ing device. You will also spend the next week adding back the apps, pass­words, and data that it turns out you were using but had for­got­ten about. You will lose all of your deeply ingrained kinetic mem­ory, the auto­matic fin­ger presses and unthink­ing scrolling though the pages to reach the thing that you need.
Still.. new ter­rain. As an adult how often do you get enter new ter­rain for such a small price? Sure you can change jobs, change houses, change spouses, all of which take up a lot more than a lazy Sunday after­noon babysit­ting a hard­ware reset and a cou­ple of hours of soft­ware updates and restor­ing data and pass­words. And so I did it. Settings -> General -> Reset -> Reset All Settings and pressed the many pop-​up but­tons that con­firmed that I did indeed intend to remake my phone into a pris­tine ver­sion of its now non-​functioning self.
We all love the oppor­tu­nity to rein­vent our­selves. Even if it’s only in terms of lit­tle bit of pris­tine elec­tronic wilder­ness that we can remake to suit our now two years older and wiser self. New phone wall­pa­per, a clean slate of wi-​fi set­tings, and some nifty new apps. — Even if you end up reim­port­ing all of the depress­ing fit­ness band data.

I think I was a cat for Halloween one year. I have a pic­ture of me in a leo­tard and tights with a con­struc­tion paper ears and a tail and my face painted white with black whiskers.  It’s not much of a tail and I remem­ber being a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed that I didn’t have a cloth one with wire in it so that I could make it twitch or at least curl it inter­est­ingly. I don’t remem­ber any­thing else about that Halloween, or that cos­tume. But I do have the picture.

I’m try­ing to work with the notion of fam­ily sto­ries in some essays that I am writ­ing. The need for those sto­ries and the vari­abil­ity of those sto­ries and how they orga­nize and glue together fam­i­lies. The prob­lem is that I need exam­ples and at any given moment in time I can’t just call up sto­ries. My mem­ory is entirely asso­cia­tive. It’s as if my mem­ory is a very tan­gled ball of twine — the only way to find my mem­o­ries is to be offered an end of the string made up of some other mem­ory or some remark from some­one. Or a picture.

I have a small album of pic­tures that my mother gave to me when I got mar­ried. In it are pic­tures of me as a child and a few of me and my sib­lings.  I love those pictures.

Some of those pic­tures of me are from before I mak­ing con­scious mem­o­ries. There are pic­tures of me being held by my grand­par­ents. One of me as a one year-​old proudly wear­ing my father’s watch. And oh the hair, bright white and all over the place — fright-​wig and looks like Einstein were fre­quent remarks.

Slowly as a I page through the pic­tures some things become clearer. I remem­ber a house we lived in when I was  4 and my grandparent’s back yard. There’s the one of my in a tutu and those blue cat eye glasses with my friend from kinder­garten — whose name was… oh yeah Linda! And how I wanted to be a bal­le­rina — but I don’t think I ever took dance lessons. (If I’m wrong my mom will tell me.)

There are pic­tures of me and my sib­lings. One spe­cial one of the five of us just after my youngest brother was born. I don’t remem­ber the pic­ture being taken but I do remem­ber the warm September day that he was born. The neigh­bor was look­ing after us and told us in the mid­dle of the after­noon that we had a brother. And remem­ber­ing that after­noon reminds me of the fam­ily story that’s told about my brother’s birth. You see, it’s said that my dad and the doc­tor watched the first game of a Pirates double-​header while wait­ing for my brother to be born. It con­tin­ues that after Joe’s birth with my dad, the doc­tor, and my new baby brother watch­ing the sec­ond game. True? Most likely not. But it’s been told over and over again and it does explain Joe’s grade-​school obses­sion with baseball.

Once I start down that road — grab that bit of string of mem­ory I can find another story and another story and yet another. Stories about my broth­ers and their oddly bal­anced rela­tion­ship (5 years and a goodly num­ber of pounds sep­a­rated them but they put up a united front when­ever chal­lenged.) Stories about my sis­ters and their pas­sions, one for music, the other for horses. All the things that make my fam­ily uniquely my family.

But with­out the first pic­ture I get no where.

So I keep in my stu­dio a small brown, now quite beaten up, photo album. With a hand­ful of pic­tures. That can send me back in time and unravel my mem­ory knots. Every time I open it I’m grate­ful that my mom made it for me.