People disagree vehemently about what happened, particularly in families. For example, my sister-in-law does not remember her husband, my brother, being present the night my step-father died. I remember him not only being there, but beginning to sing Hatikvah -- I think. Now I wonder.
My younger brother and I have had a long argument about him showing up at some friends in Haifa in 1995. He has no memory of being there and I remember him picking up a guitar and singing "Chuckie's in Love" by Rikki Lee Jones. Go figure.
Those are the strangest memories, -the ones where you aren't sure if they are real or not. Can you imagine what it would be like if you woke up one day, and everyone referred to you by another name? You looked at your license, and your name was the one that people were now calling you? How long would it take before you started to think that it was you who was wrong?
I recall an episode of The Prisoner like that. Everyone in The Village insisted that Patrick McGoohan's character was someone else. The whole amazing series, broadcast in 1968-69, involved people messing very seriously with his brain. Most of Hubski is too young to remember this show. Was it ever rebroadcast?
This reminded me a bit of a Stephen King interview I just heard on the Terry Gross show in which King talks about what it is that scares him now as opposed to when he was a kid: Losing ones mind is terrifying as an adult. But I realize this is not really what you are talking about, even young people tend to have revisionist versions of actual events. I sort of think this is a self-preservationist method to staying sane. Things can be awful, remembering them as amazing sure helps. We recently took my daughter to a baseball game on a Saturday night. In the summer they have fireworks at the end of the game and we really talked this up to her. She was very excited and kept saying, "now fireworks?" Eventually the fireworks came and they scared the bajeesus out of her. Loud, way too close and constant. She cowered in my arms as my wife placed her hands over her ears. The next day all my daughter did was brag to everyone about the fireworks she saw and how much she liked them. To her, it sure beat the reality."So here's the movie that scared me the most in the last 12 or 13 years: The movie opens with a woman in late middle age, sitting at a table and writing a story, and the story goes something like, 'Then the branches creaked in the ...' and she stops and she says to her husband, 'What are those things? I can't think of them. They're in the backyard and they're very tall and birds land on the branches.' And he says, 'Why, Iris, those are trees,' and she says, 'Yes, how silly of me,' and she writes the word and the movie starts. And that's Iris Murdoch and she's suffering the onset of Alzheimer's disease. That's the boogeyman in the closet now. ... I'm afraid of losing my mind."
Amazing -- the actual fireworks were terrifying, but the memory was awesome. I actually console myself when I'm going through something awful by thinking of myself telling the story of it the next day. But I'm not sure this is true. After writing this blog, I'm not too sure of anything...