When I was a kid, my family was Jewish (Reform), but we had a Christmas tree every year. Although we celebrated all the Jewish holidays, my parents thought it would be nice to have a Christmas tree as well. I remember trees that were so tall they had to be shortened to fit in the living room. And I remember that they got smaller every year until finally, when I was about 11 or 12, we had one a couple feet high, on a book shelf, then none at all. And I remember getting presents from under the tree, and my father dressed in a Santa costume one year (we got Chanukah presents as well).
I remember the lights and the ornaments we had. I remember where they were kept the rest of the season. I remember stringing popcorn and cranberries. I remember baking gingerbread cookies and hanging them on the tree, and discovering one morning that the dog ate the ones on the bottom of the tree.
It turns out that nobody in the family remembers that we ever had a Christmas tree. You’d think my mother would remember, or my brother who’s three years older than I am. Or my aunts or uncles or cousins. But no, I’m the only one who remembers.
“Remember last week when I told you the office party had been moved to Tuesday?”
“… what?”
“Last week. I got the email. We talked about it for several minutes over dinner.”
“I don’t think we did.”
“You said you didn’t want to go because you had a lesson that night.”
“I sort of remember you saying they were talking about changing the date…”
“There is no ‘sort of’. They sent an email saying the first party was canceled and instead it’s on Tuesday. There was never a time where it was up in the air. It was one email.”
“That’s not what you told me.”
etc. etc. I apparently make up phantom conversations on a regular basis, since he denies they ever happened.
My mother was very surprised to find out that the first PC my family owned was actually mine, paid for with my money (she did remember it was bought second hand from a friend).
Considering that I almost threw her and Dad from our balcony (we lived in a 10th floor) when, a few weeks later, they bought the latestestest model for my brother, whose 1st-college-year draftsmanship was apparently more important than my thesis… I’m not likely to forget it.
The friend from whom I bought it happened to come by a couple days later and I asked him about it. He even remembered how much I paid for it.
There’s a bit of a reverse spin on this one… Having recently resumed two friendships from childhood, I have come to learn that some of their fondest memories about me are a couple of events at which I was not present. From one, I got “remember that time when we were drinking and driving and crashed into a house?” Dude, if I had been in a car accident that involved alcohol and crashing into a house, it would be something I could never forget! He was sure it was me, and he says he checked with another guy, who also says it was me. Both of them are wrong.
For one, I didn’t live in that town with them at a time when any of us were old enough to drive, or had a car. Two, there is no way I could have survived the beating I would have got from my old man if I’d been in a car accident and hit a house. Three, I have never been in a car accident, period. So I remember that I wasn’t there, despite them telling me I was.
Related to that are some of the memories of my best friend from back then. He and I go back to fourth grade. He came down here to be my best man. I learned that he seems to think I did a bunch of things at which I could not possibly have been present. “Remember when we did…(painfully stupid event)…and Russell (did some thing), and Dave said…” No, I don’t remember doing that thing. For starters, I was living a hundred miles away then. I have never met anyone named Russell, and I’ve never had a friend named Dave. I’ve never been to this place where you say it happened, and the people and events you describe are totally unfamiliar to me. “Oh, you were so there! (goes on to relate more stuff that never happened to me)…” My wife started to notice this, too, because there were several tales of things I used to do, that I never used to do. I’m not having selective memory, or lying to save face or anything. I remember that these things never happened to me. How they can remember the opposite is a mystery…
When I was a very young toddler, my parents were preparing to host a Christmas dinner for my grandparents. My father was holding me, which was a rare occurence. He had just opened a bottle of wine and my mother was fiddling with it. This I remember clearly: it was a screw-top bottle. My parents were just getting settled and their budget was very, very tight back then.
Evidently, I was quite curious about all the goings on and must have been staring at the bottle. As a lark, and to see what my reaction would be, my father convinced my mother to give me a taste of the red wine. It was almost literally a thimbleful, offered to me in the bottle cap.
Of course to baby taste buds, it was sour and bitter and acidic and awful. I must have wrinkled up my face in utter disgust because both my parents laughed at my expression.
My mother denies this ever took place. “There is absolutely no way in hell I would ever give alcohol to a baby. Not ever. Not even a tiny taste!” I described the scene to her, and she can corroborate the dinner and the screw-top bottle of red wine, but claims to have no memory of ever offering me that tiniest of tastes.
FWIW, I don’t think she is lying to save face. I think it was such an incidental, impulsive thing, that it’s lost in the more significant memories of that night.
OK, this is one frustration I will take to my grave.
When I was about ten or eleven, I looked in the mirror in the bathroom next to the kitchen. I happened to twist my upper lip just so and saw a scar I had never noticed, vertically running from below the nostril to my lip. I say to mom who is in the kitchen, Hey mom, what’s this scar I have on my lip? --You fell ice skating when you were little.
Cool. Great.
Fast forward to about six years or so ago, when I would have been about 31. Mom, my friend and I are chatting about childhood events. Mom mentions how my best friend Chris threw a snowball at me, which had rocks in it. I have no recollection so I say, what now? Yes, that’s how you got that scar on your lip.
Cool. Great. Replace ice skating story with snowball story.
Fast forward a few years later when in amusement I bring up the confusion about the origin of this scar. Mom denies knowledge of EITHER explanation and remembers nothing about either conversation. What’s more, she doesn’t have an explanation for the scar.
Gene Wilder had a short lived TV show called “Something Wilder.” He played the father on two year old twins.
One epsiode had Alice Cooper moving next door. When Gene went over to Alice’s house to complain about the noise and music, Alice retaliated by complaining about Gene’s music, specifically the Barney song. Alice then proceeds to sing “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family.”
I swear I’m the only person who saw that. And I will never forget it.
I have a very clear memory from when I was about four or five: I was at my paternal grandparents’ house. My great-grandfather was in his twilight years and was living with my grandparents. He was the coolest man - he had immigrated to the US from Hungary, had the best accent, and played a mean fiddle. I remember sitting on the floor of his bedroom, playing with a set of matryoshki (Russian nested dolls), while he sat in his rocking chair and chatted with me. Not only does no one in my family remember this event (not terribly surprising), no one remembers that he even owned a a set of matryoshki. My grandmother claims to have gone through all of his things after he passed away, and she didn’t find them.
On the other hand, I was chatting with my parents once and they said something to the effect of “Remember telling us that story about your friend who drove into a fire hydrant?” I expressed my complete bafflement, and they proceeded to tell me the story of my friend who had a mean habit of running his car into snowmen that neighborhood children had built. The kids got wise to him and built a snowman around a fire hydrant, with the expected result. I agreed that it was a funny story, but it wasn’t mine. Both of my parents swore up and down that I had told them the story, and I started to wonder if I was losing my mind.
Many months later, my father was talking to his sister, telling her about how I must be going crazy because I didn’t remember telling them this story of my friend who ran into a fire hydrant. My aunt piped up and said “Really? She has a friend who ran into a snowman-covered fire hydrant too?” :smack:
Nobody in my family can believe that I had a cat, because I avoid theirs.
But they all met the several cats my wife or daughter would bring home from time to time and keep for a year or so.
The’ll say “You only think you don’t like cats because you never had one around.”
When my parents bought their old house (we moved a couple of months ago) the house was on [what was then] a quiet badly lit road. I suggested they paint the 5ft tall gateposts white to avoid any bumps. They duly did so and in the 15 years since various people have been credited with coming up with that idea - none of them being me tho’ “no I clearly remember your brother buying the tin of paint!”.
Many years ago I had a pony, the yard where I kept her was full of kids who’d a habit of using saddle oil from the 3 gallon tin, and leaving the lid off, allowing the tin to be knocked over. I took a pile of small plastic tubs up one day and dispensed doses of the oil into them - that way if it was left laying around they only lost a few spoonfuls and not the whole tin. Someone was given a present for having the bright idea of bringing them tubs up. Yup, that’s right it wasn’t me, nobody saw me, I can’t prove anything…
I’ve also fallen foul of the “but you were there!” scenario, leading people to think I know things that I have no clue about. Minor one, a friend was knocked down by a kid on a bike. I wasn’t there. She thinks I was. When I asked what happened to her shoe (the strap was broken when she was knocked off her feet) she flew into a rage at me and didn’t speak to me for three days.
When the Infiniti cars were first introduced in the US, their theme song pronounced the brand name InfinEYEti. My husband thinks I’m nuts, but I remember the theme song from the commercials.
On a different tack… when my dad was young, he attended a now-defunct summer camp (presumably somewhere in the Chicago area) called “Camp Big Paw”. At one point, he sang part of the Camp Big Paw theme song for me. In 20 or 30 years, I may be the only person in the entire world familiar with the Camp Big Paw theme song.
I also remember lots of random words from skits and songs made up by me and friends during my childhood, which, given that I have a relatively good memory for such things, are probably only remembered by me.
Oh, cats. My mom swears that I knew Elmer and never knew Illy. In fact, it’s just the opposite. I have very fond memories of Illy. I only ever saw Elmer in a photograph. We had five cats in my lifetime, and he was not one of them.
::Rilchiam sits and pictures Illy’s head on her knee, softly purring::
Here’s one which an entire nation has gotten wrong.
When former IOC chief Juan Antonio Samaranch announced Atlanta had won the right to host the '96 Olympics, he mispronounced the name of the city as “At-a-lanta”. When he announced the that Sydney had won the rights to host the 2000 games, he called it “Synee”. Yet, you ask any person in Australia what he said, and they’ll laugh at how he said “Sy-der-nee”. He didn’t! Yet, this didn’t stop endless comedy routines and such. It’s weird how twenty million people can have such a false memory.
When I was a kid we went camping every summer for a couple of weeks. One day, I was running to the swing set, fell and hit my chin on the support beam. I cut my chin open and also got a gash on my knee. I still bear the scars some 30-odd years later. Nobody from the family remembers and my mom claims none of us kids were injured while camping.
On the flip-side I have absolutely no recollection of attending a friends 13th birthday party. I’ve been told by several people I was there. I’m even in some of the pictures from the party. Still I have no memory of attending.
I remember one of my earliest memories of TV being getting up really early on Saturday mornings (5AM?) and watching a cartoon called “Zero Zero Island”. It had characters called ‘Colonel Bleep’, ‘Scratch’ (a caveman who was none too smart), and ‘Squeak’ (a mechanical cowboy who straversed on a uni-cycle wheel instead of legs). No one that I’ve ever spoken to ever remembered that show being broadcast.
I was even starting to think that perhaps I’d dreamed it up myself when one of my sons asked to rent a DVD of the original adventures of “Speed Racer”. At the end of the “Speed Racer” episodes on the DVD were two episodes of “Zero Zero Island”!!!
My mother has always been extremely weight conscious to an extreme. She had 5 kids and still wears a size 4.
It was Easter and I was about 9-10 and I had on a peach dress that I was thrilled with. I remember like it was yesterday my mother commenting that I was “getting chubby”.
To this day she swears she never said it but I know she did. I have old pictures of that Easter and I was a stick- straight up and down skinny. We all were. I think that was the beginning of my eating disorders. To me her voice sounded like it was the most horrible, disgusting thing in the world to be.
She may have forgotten saying it or blocked it. My mother was a great mother, very caring and it still escapes me that she could have been so cruel.
