When I was little, I remember a plastic item that was like a hollow ball, about the size of a softball. It opened into two halves; like bowls. There were openings, like short tubes, on each side. You put a scoop of ice cream in the bowl, close the other half onto it, stick one tube into a bottle of root beer (or Coke) and drink from the other tube, through the ice cream, like a float. I remember everybody had these. We had several in our kitchen drawer. But nobody in my family or anyone else who grew up with me remembers them.
There’s a mall near my house that when I was little was open air. They eventually roofed it over.
Anyway, I remember going there when I was little and there being circus tents. Inside were cages with different sorts of animals. I know one had monkeys.
Well some people at work were discussing how the mall was open air and I mentioned the animals and none of them remembered it. They were all a few years older than me, so their memories should have been better.
So I asked my parents and they don’t remember.
I guess I have a better imagination than I thought.
and Athena, I feel your pain. My ex would completely forget conversations we had two days earlier. Especially conversations where I asked her to do something.
If I hadn’t grown up in a non-snowy place I would have wondered if you were my sister. My mom is ALWAYS doing this. Here’s an example: I have a plain gold ring that once belonged to my grandma. It looks like a wedding ring, but my mom told me it was my grandma’s engagement ring. People often asked me if I was married, was it a wedding ring, etc. and I always told them no, it was my grandma’s engagement ring and I don’t know why it doesn’t have a stone, maybe that was just the style back in Nebraska in the 40s. I asked my mom about it on SEVERAL occasions, and she always gave me the same answer, until a couple years ago, and she looked at me with shock: “Of course it’s not an engagement ring! It doesn’t have a stone! It’s a wedding ring! What? Of course I never said that!”
I need to start recording our conversations so I can prove that *she’s * the crazy one, not me.
He went by “His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular” and also claimed to be “King of Scotland”, which is pretty funny if you ignore the attendant massacres and cannabilism.
When my borther were young (maybe 5 or 6), my mom had us play with the kids across the street who had chicken pox so that we would all get over it at the same time. Both my mom and my brother swear that I was the one who got chicken pox and he was the one that didn’t. My brother even claims it’s on his medical record as not having had chicken pox. Both of them are conveniently forgetting that yes, I did have chicked pox but it was at age TWENTY, many years after this previous incident (and it totally sucked big ol’donkey balls too). My brother was the one who had it yet no one remembers this but me.
There’s a lot of this going on in my family. It’s gotten to the point that I take everything any parent, aunt, or uncle says with a grain of salt, because I know that five years down the line they’ll all deny it.
I can also see the potential for the same miscommunications happening with the next generation. My niece and nephew have gaping holes in their knowledge of their own mother, her siblings, and our parents. I can easily imagine them taking what little they know and embellishing it out of bits and pieces of information they hear here and there, and thinking those are memories.
One of my uncles died young. One of his surviving children, my cousin, who was about four when he died, remembers that he fought overseas in the war and he had a limp that was the result of a war injury. For some reason, her mother never liked to talk to her about her father, and she grew up far away from the other relatives, so no one was around for twenty-five years to tell her that her father never went overseas, wasn’t injured in the war at all, and never had any limp that they remember, so it must have been some temporary injury like a charlie horse.
Ah, yes. The New England Boiled Dinner Incident. My mother made this dish when I was a young’un. Essentially you throw corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, and turnips into a big pot and boil the stuffing out of it.
The first night it was okay. But. . . we kept having it. Nigh after night, an unending meal that would not die. It got to the point where I began to fear and loathe dinner. (And that is totally out of character for me.) When it was finally gone, there was much rejoicing.
Years later, the subject of the NEBDI came up. My mother insisted that we only had it two, three nights tops. My father, sister, and I told her no, we were eating that stuff for over a week.
She refused to believe it. To her dying day, she insisted that we were wrong.
I remember my dad constantly telling me as a kid to stay away from elevator shafts because a friend of his supposedly fell down one and perished. But when I bring it up, he claims he never said any such thing. I don’t know if he’s lying or if he just doesn’t remember, but I’m certain that he used to scare my sister and I with lurid tales of fatal falls.
It’s up on YouTube, or at least it was. The whole episode. Yeah, it’s good. One thing, though - that’s not the real “Renfield”. For some reason, they had an actor play Alice’s personal assistant Brian “Renfield” Nelson. You can catch a glimpse of the real guy in “Wayne’s World” though, talking to a girl at the bar.
When I was in the third grade, my father told us kids that he had a surprise for us, but he wouldn’t tell us what it was. Anticipation built for some time. Finally he told us one day that, because we’d been so continually badly behaved, he was nixing the whole deal. Then he divulged that the surprise was that he was going to get us a monkey. Crushed? You bet. My dad denies this ever happened but I’ll never forget it.
