A Reunion With Memory

I learned something about memory at my recent college reunion.

A college reunion is, of course, a place to tell and re-tell the stories that we have all told and re-told many times. In fact, the same stories are often told and re-told many times at the reunion itself. People tell those stories the way they remember them. And despite all the ways that those stories have morphed (if not to say been exaggerated) over the decades, the tellers are always certain that the way they remember them is true.

At my reunion, I know that the stories told by all of us were related with the same honesty and sincerity with which we have all tried to live. But, conversations at reunions can go something like this:

Hank: Remember when we went on the Florida trip and we stopped at Clemson, holy shit what a time!

Jack: We didn’t stop at Clemson. We stopped at GW.

Hank: No way. It was Clemson, I know it. The girl I picked up was wearing orange.

Jack: The girl you picked up was wearing orange because she had just broken out of prison.

Hank: No way. Clemson.

Jack: GW.

Or:

Craig: Remember when the House went through 42 kegs of beer on that party weekend.

Dom: Forty-two? What the fuck are you talking about. It was 52. I remember. I ordered them.

Craig: On no you didn’t. I was Party Chairman. I specifically remember the beer distributor telling me that mine was the biggest order they’d ever had from a frat.

Dom: You’re delusional.

Craig: I’m fucking wasted but I’m not delusional.

And so on and so on.

This is natural. It is how our minds develop the stories of our lives. We want to believe what we want to believe, and our minds construct what we want to believe. I’ll give you an example. This really happened.

At my reunion, we had a whole bunch of us staying at a house we rented. One of the guys left his sport coat hanging over the railing of the porch we’d been drinking on the day before. A couple of us saw it and, this being a college reunion and because we were again drinking, we decided to hide it on the guy. I hung it up in the closet in the room where I was staying. Later, the guy came back.

“Anybody seen my coat?” he asked

We all shook our heads, and the guy went back into the house to begin his search. He came back a little later, proud, and happy and clutching his sport coat.

“I found it, he proclaimed.

“Where was it?” I asked.

“In the closet in the first-floor bedroom.”

Wow,” we said, doing our best considering our beer intake to keep our faces straight, “how did it get there?”

“I remember now,” he said. Last night, I’d put the coat on a chair in the dining room but then I thought that I’d better hang it up, so I went to the nearest bedroom and put it in the closet there.”

“Ah, one of the other guys said, you connected all the dots, huh?”

“Yup,” he chirped.

“There’s only one thing wrong,” I said, “none of that is true,” as it obviously wasn’t.

But had we not pointed out that his memory was utterly false, it would have been his truth.  

How many of my memories are as real as my buddy’s sport coat memory would have been? How much of history is the same?

No sense figuring that out, though, because first, we could never know, and second, if I did figure it out today, my memory of it would be different tomorrow.