Do you have any strong memories that turned out not to have happened at all?
When I was a kid back in '75/'76 I would listen to music on the school bus( bqck then the driver would play KJRB on the drive from Spirit Lake to Rathdrum), and one of my favorite songs was “Abracadabra” by The Steve Miller Band. I was watching “Solid Gold” on one of the Roku Channels about an hour ago, and one of the songs for the top 40 year end countdown was “Abracadabra”…in 1982! Not only was this after I left high school, but it was two years after I left the Air Force.
Got any examples of your memory playing you for a chump?
I’m from Generation X and our “where were you when?” moment is usually said to be the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. For my whole life I could have easily told you I was in my 3rd grade teacher’s classroom when we heard the news.
A year or two ago, on a whim, I looked up the date of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, and counted backward from the year I graduated from high school. It turns out I was in 4th grade.
I remember a terrible thing happening when I was a small child. Mom was cooking dinner and had just removed the pot of veggies from the cooking ring and turned the ring off so it was no longer glowing bright red, when my younger brother, who was watching from atop the kitchen stool chair, leaned over to see what was in the bigger pot on the other front ring and he placed his hand on the still-hot, but no longer glowing ring. Of course screaming and chaos broke out and a neighbor called to babysit so they could drive the child to the ER. It’s a very clear memory.
But the child wasn’t my younger brother. It was me. I even made them show me the medical records because I didn’t believe it was true. Displacement of memory is real.
When I was in my teens, I could clearly remember the night one of our cats died. My parents had taken the cat to the vet., and I was sitting on the living room couch, waiting for them to come back. I had an utterly clear physical memory of sitting on that couch, waiting.
I told this story to my mother, and she denied it. She said my father had taken the cat to the vet., but she hadn’t gone with them, she had stayed home with me. She said I was in my bed the whole time. She also said she wouldn’t have left me in the house without an adult there. I said my older sisters were presumably there and she might well have left me with them. I said maybe she thought I was in bed but I could have gotten up without her hearing me. I wouldn’t believe that she was right –
until I realized that, in that utterly clear memory of me sitting on the couch, I was sitting on the couch like I’m now sitting on this chair: my back against the back of the couch, my legs bent at the knees over the edge of the couch.
I was three years old when that cat died. My legs weren’t long enough for me to sit on a couch like that. They’d have been sticking straight out in front of me.
If I think back to the Challenger disaster, I remember that it was a Tuesday, I had an English final, and that I was a freshman in high school.
Wikipedia tells me it was my sophomore year. Except for the teachers and the actual test, it was a similar situation as freshman year, as most of the students were the same group, and we were in the same auditorium.
For the longest time I thought I had memories of being seven years old and listening to live news coverage on the radio about the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In retrospect, I’ve realized it was a radio broadcast of Roger Waters’ live performance of The Wall in Berlin later that same year.
I spent a long time being sure I had seen Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones with my father. That particular made-for-TV movie aired for the first time in mid-April 1980, several weeks after my father died.
My best guess is that I saw a different movie about the same event with my father, and managed to confuse the two works. Obviously, the lead actors would have looked quite similar, since they were playing the same real-life person. I do remember my father paying close attention to news coverage about Jonestown as well.
Whoa–reading that gave me goosebumps!
This sounds like a great textbook example of depersonalization/derealization, a psychology thing I’ve been studying lately - how it is the way that the brains of some people distance themselves from trauma by making it seem to not be really ‘them.’
Here’s a current one for me- I remember co-workers talking about the TV show Survivor at lunch and how the producers had to put up the losers in a luxury hotel until the season was over. Thing is that I remember this from around 1990 or earlier, and the show didn’t start until 2000 according to Wikipedia…
Was there an earlier show that was similar in the U.S.?
A pretty minor, inconsequential example in the scheme of things, but I’m not being flippant- it really kind of freaked me out at the time how memories can betray one in matters both small and large.
So awhile back I saw ‘Earth Girls Are Easy’ on the Amazon Prime movie list or somewhere. I was in an 80s movie nostalgia binge at the time, and I clearly remember renting the VHS tape of EGAE from Blockbuster and enjoying it with a girlfriend as a fun piece of fluff back in the day. Also, I thought, it doesn’t hurt that there’s an extended scene with Geena Davis in a skimpy green bikini. I’ve always had a bit of a celebrity crush on her.
So I’m watching it on streaming 30+ years later, and it doesn’t disappoint as nostalgia- it is pure distilled, concentrated 80s kitsch.
But…when it gets to the bikini scene, Geena is wearing a pink bikini. I thought WTF…? Is this an alternate take or something? I mean, I had a clear picture in my mind of Geena wearing a green bikini.
Two things occur to me on the topic of memories, both related to the Alfred Hitchcock Presents series that I’m currently watching – an example of 1950s television at its best. It’s a collection that I’ve had for quite a while, and obviously have it because I like it and remember enjoying it. I started watching chronologically, starting with Season 1. Knowing that many of the stories feature surprise twists, I wondered how long it would be before I recognized a story, which would spoil the surprise ending. In fact, I am now more than halfway through Season 3, and … nothing. Every episode is as if I’d never seen it before. It’s bizarre – I have distinct memories of books that I read as a child, but nothing about this series appears to have registered, even though I’m sure I must have watched at least some of it within the past decade or so.
And speaking of freaky things related to memories, I don’t have any freaky things to share that I can recall, so I’m going to share a really excellent episode in Season 3 of Hitchcock that I just watched last night. It’s called The Foghorn.
Spoiler alert: don’t read this if there’s any chance you’ll ever be watching it!!
It’s an eerie, bittersweet romance set in many fog-shrouded scenes, about a young woman who breaks off her engagement when she falls deeply in love with another man. One day she is out with him on a sailboat when they are becalmed, unable to get back to shore, and a thick fog sets in. They think they hear a foghorn somewhere on the shore, but it’s actually a ship, and the scene ends as the ship appears from out of the fog, heading right for them.
Later we see the woman tossing and turning in bed, and we hear her internal monologue where she is confused about what happened or where she is. Suddenly she has a terrible sense of foreboding, begins to realize that she’s in a hospital, and fears that her lover may have been killed.
She looks at her hands, and wonders why they look so oddly wrinkled. Everyone always told her what beautiful hands she had. As a doctor and nurse approach her room, the nurse asks the doctor if it’s true that we suddenly have vivid memories just as we’re about to die. The doctor replies that the woman certainly hasn’t recognized anyone that’s come to see her in the last 50 years. They enter the room, and we see that she is dead, and very, very old.
I think there’s a scene of Davis wearing a green bikini in Thelma and Louise. Maybe you confused those two movies?
Ah, very possible. That’s another movie I have to do a 21st century rewatch sometime.
If it’s 2000, then I’m off by 1 year. My first time watching Survivor was with season 2. I remember missing one of the episodes on a night when I went to go see Jimmy Buffett in concert. I remember that being during my first year of medical school, which was 1999-2000. If my memory was accurate, that would mean Survivor season 1 aired in either late '98 or early '99. This means I’m off by one year.
Right before the VCR boom and VHS rental boom hit in the 80s it was possible to rent both a VCR and tapes. Our more affluent neighbors did this then borrowed both the VCR and two movies they rented. The Blues Brothers and The Blues Brothers part 2.
My parents weren’t interested in watching them so my 15 year-old self hooked it up to our TV and I watched The Blues Brothers for the first time. I loved the movie and decided when I got home from school the next day I was going to watch part 2.
To my dismay when I got home my parents had already returned everything to the neighbors. Flash forward a year or so later (1986 or so) and I was combing every video rental place for Blues Brothers part 2. Somebody finally told me that no such movie exists.
But I was absolutely positive I had the VHS tape of that movie in my hands a year previously.
That would be the right time for Fly Like an Eagle though. Maybe you just swapped songs?
Potentially coincidentally: I have an strong memory of hearing that song on my way to kindergarten one day.
For me it’s the death of Ayrton Senna and Freddie Mercury which were huge cultural landmarks of my youth. In my memory they are roughly simultaneously, but actually they are over 3 years apart. Which would not be a big deal at my age(everything 2000-2015 is 5-10 years ago 
). But the difference between happening when I was 14 and happening when I was 17 is massive. Like I remember kids telling horrible homophobic jokes about the two deaths at my secondary school, but that can’t have happened as I’d moved to sixth form by the time of Aryton Senna’s death.
Yes. It fascinates me, even after 59 years.
Speaking of alternate takes, I distinctly remember watching the Tom Hanks movie Big while I was in New Zealand. . .