A Question of Memory

Witnesses are notoriously unreliable. If five people watch a crime being committed, you will get five different accounts of precisely what happened.

The same is true of meetings. If you sit through one with four of your coworkers, and if someone doesn't summarize what the action steps are, you and the other four folks will come out with differing opinions of what has been decided.

"The Outtake"

We all have built-in filters. Our experiences are run through them before we decide what to remember. We keep the things that resonate with us and discard those that do not. It's just how we are wired.

 When I was in my teens, I talked about a memory I had of our car running out of fuel and my Dad leaving my six-year-old self parked on a big hill while he went to get gas. He was horrified. He told me he never would have done that. I realized it must have been a nightmare, one that was so vivid, it became a memory. I'd held on to that nightmare for years. (I still get cold and clammy when the gas needle dips below a quarter of a tank.)

My husband tells a tale of our wedding, totally fabricated. It is certainly more "interesting" than the true story. He says if he tells it over and over often enough, when I'm old and senile, it's the tale I will tell to our grandchildren. (I think certain politicians espouse this "story-often-told-becomes-the-truth" theory.)

If you really want to test the waters on this memory thing, talk to the people you grew up with. Discuss your perception of what it was like being a child in your home. You will get as many variations as you have siblings. We choose our memories and horde them like bits of precious metal -- some of it radioactive. The golden bits are evidence that we were loved. The radium proof of the slights we endured.

In the end, what you keep is as telling as the memories themselves.

As I get older, I struggle to remember lots of things. And I wonder if the memories I hold dear are real or imagined. Then I decide it really doesn't matter, especially if they are happy. We're only hoofing it on this big rock for a short time, and often it's the good thoughts that keep us going.

In my book of childhood memories, I'm going to keep "dancing" to Mitch Miller records with Paul, listening to John and Gary play Beatles albums over and over, doing scavenger hunts made up by Diane, and late-night chats with Denise.

And I'm going to hope my son does the same kind of filtering with his childhood. Lucky for us, he doesn't have any siblings to compare notes with.

Since "Chuck" went off to college and never came back!