Only they're gone faster than the smell after it rains

Every single website that I visited this week (save, I think, for the Weather Channel website, but I can't even be certain of that) at one point or another posted a story or tribute to Robin Williams in the wake of his death. Everyone seems to have a "Robin Williams story" or memory that they've felt compelled to share, alluding mostly to fond memories of his work or brief personal encounters with him on the street or on sets.

Robin Williams served for me, as he seemed to serve for all Millennials, not just as a fixture of my childhood, but a vivid fixture, someone who seemed consistently and vibrantly alive and present in my life. With most film celebrities, you sort of forget about them right after you see their latest movie. They disappear into Invisible Actor Limbo until their next press junket. But with Williams (partially because the stretches between his films were never long and the core of his personality seemed to shine through from movie to movie), it was as if I was more persistently aware that he was a real human out there in the world, walking around, flustering people with too-rapid jokes. And I'm guessing this Quality of Vividness is responsible for the fact that, as people have been sharing their memories and stories about Williams, I've been able to clearly hear these encounters in my imagination. When a journalist recalled meeting Williams and hearing him respond to a compliment with something so mundane as, "Oh, thanks man, I really appreciate it," I could distinctly hear Robin Williams' voice saying those words.

I don't find this strange, considering how much exposure I've had to Williams' voice over the years through repeated watchings of Aladdin, Good Will Hunting, Hook, Jumanji, Mrs. Doubtfire (even Death to Smoochy, but not Dead Poets Society, believe it or not). However, it does make me think about the overall strangeness and frustrating vagaries of aural memory. Voices are, in my experience, more difficult to recall, more prone to erasure, than faces or thoughts or other chunks of memory. As I'm sitting here, I'm struggling to remember the voices of high school teachers, college acquaintances, old coworkers, even as I clearly remember their faces, personalities, and mannerisms. I'm confident that, if I encountered any of these people on the street, I wouldn't be surprised by what their voices sound like, and the lost memory would pop back to life like an unusually welcome zombie, but at this moment their voices aren't available for recall.

Of course it's not as though there isn't a pattern to the voices you remember vs. those that get forgotten. The voices of the people you've talked to most frequently and/or recently tend to stick with you, so, pleasantly, you probably recall best the voices of those closest to your heart (plus a random assortment of people you're indifferent to or despise but interact with on a regular basis).

But all of us have that weird, gray area filled with people that we care about deeply but simply don't talk to very often. These tend to be the people that, in a past generation, we would have continued to chat with by phone in order to maintain the relationship. But these days Facebook and texting conspire to make such time-consuming chit-chat unnecessary. Provided that you see these people once or twice per year, you don't need to talk on the phone to stay up-to-date on each others' lives when, in the gaps between visits, you can instead check Facebook to glean the headlines. This 21st-century method works well in a number of ways: posted photos keep you reminded of the person's face, status updates of their personality, and intimacy can be maintained with the occasional text conversation. While there may be many aspects of the relationship that strengthen or suffer when social media replaces phone calls, the only one that definitely disappears entirely is the sound of your friend's voice. (Our indifference to this disappearance feels almost a little rude when you consider that 19th century Americans, encountering the invention of the telephone, were stunned by the privilege of getting to hear a loved one's voice rather than having to send a letter or telegram.) When you rely on social media to maintain these relationships, your love for and investment in these gray-area friends may never erode, but their voices are liable to sneakily slip from your memory or diminish in vividness.

More people have joined this gray area for me since I moved to Boston, which is what's making my fickle memory for voices (which is, after all, a pretty unremarkable fact of brain functioning) more noticeable to me. At moments like this, it strikes me as odd that I'm capable of recalling the voices of Robin Williams and other randomly memorable celebrities who are technically complete strangers (Susan Sarandon bizarrely falls into this category for me), better than those of some of my closest friends.