So, I was sharing a memory today. Grew up in Philly. My parents went to see the touring company of “Equus” back when it first set out off of Broadway. 1976? 1977?
I was a theater kid. They was sufficiently moved that on the way out, they bought me a SRO ticket for a few days hence.
It was in the round, at a theater in Fairmount Park.
It starred Jenny Agutter, Peter Firth and Anthony Perkins as Dysart.
I can see the small stage, surrounded by the audience on plain plank seats. I can see the performers. The amazing metal tube-formed horse heads. The electrifying last scene, played in the nude by the two leads.
Except that none of those three performed in that touring company. While I did indeed see it in the round in Philly, the memories of watching those actors perform is wholly wrong.
I’ve believed these visual memories to be accurate for my entire life. I saw it when I was…14? I’m about to turn 64.
Insane.
You have a similar memory that is quite firmly affixed that has, decades later, proven to be mostly or completely false?
I remembered that my family and I went to Oklahoma City just a few months after the bombing, in 1998. Then recently I checked the dates again and found out our trip was actually three years after the incident, because the bombing was in 1995.
I had this memory of my biological father dating a really messed up substance-abusing woman. She is actually the mother of my half-sister and had like nine kids. I remember her being strung out all the time.
The last time I talked to my father (10 years ago?) he swore up and down she never did drugs. I wonder if my mother thought she was doing drugs and commented about it to me and that idea just stuck. I remember her being very thin and kind of a nervous person.
She ended up losing custody of my half-sister, as did my father. I’ve got no idea what happened to any of them.
So much crazy shit happened in my childhood that a lot of it is a blur. I can remember specific incidents but my guesses about my age at the time are usually wrong. It’s come down to “this happened somewhere between the ages of 12 and 17.” Most of my memories have been corroborated but often in ways that really screw with my mental timeline.
One of my most notable childhood memories involves an earthquake. It was in Cleveland, so it wasn’t anything like a California earthquake, but it was big enough that most people noticed it. Part of the memory involves me being in the same school as my sister, and there was only one year of our lives when that happened, when I was in kindergarten and she was in third grade.
But of course there are historical records of earthquakes, and there was none in that year. So I must be misremembering the part about her being in the same school as I.
When I was 5, we lived in Columbus, Indiana. I had a baby sister named Sarah. We would visit this park which I was told was named Sarah-land, which I thought was nice. It had a big water tower which had the name SARAH-LAND on it, and that was one of my strongest memories I took away from the place, because in that flat farmland that surrounded the park, we could see that water tower for miles when coming or going.
Many moons later, I was chatting with my mother in text online, and I mentioned the place, and she corrected me, called it “CERALAND.” I went what, did they rename it? No, that was its name all along. So I looked it up online… Yep, she was right. Cummins Employees Recreation Association. And I even knew that at the time it was only for Cummins employees and others associated with the company, which we were by dint my father worked for one of their contractors.
That water tower didn’t match my memory; I totally conflated it with some other water tower in a different town that had multiple support stands. But still, I remembered the big SARAH-LAND on it. Which I somehow knew how to read even though I was preliterate. I confabulated that memory later when I learned how to read. So I carried that false memory for something on the order of 35 years before Mom corrected me.
My family would go on road trips a lot when I was young, and once, sometime around 1980, we had to turn back and head home early when a devastating flood happened across such a wide part of the country there was no way past it. I always assumed it was the one known as the Southland Floods, but that isn’t possible as that was Jan 1984, when my Dad was in hospital from heart troubles (and died that Feb).
It was definitely a flood, as I remember the photos we took, but it must have been a less severe one.
I have vivid memories of playing one summer in a house under construction and wiping sweat and sawdust off our faces in the hot sun.
We were driving past the house (40 years later) and I mentioned that. My parents said that it was built in late fall/early winter, so no hot sun or sweat.
This thread of mine from the dawn of this board. This memory was just as clear to me as I described in the OP. I was just wrong.
Also, I had a very distinct memory of going to see my grandfather in the hospital not long before he died, one of the few memories I had of him. I was in 5th grade at the time. Some time back, I finally found his *obit. Nope. He died when I was in 2nd grade.
*The name I knew him by was not one of his given names, and it took a while before I could eventually ferret it out, as there was no longer anyone around who could have answered that question.
For years, I distinctly remembered watching The Matthew Shepard Story during a high school assembly. I knew it was that movie because I also distinctly remembered a teacher saying, during the post-viewing Q&A, “…and I realize this is The Matthew Shepard Story and not The Laramie Project.”
Years later, I learned that The Matthew Shepard Story hadn’t even been released while I was still in high school, and what we’d actually watched was an HBO made-for-TV film about Matthew Shepard called Anatomy of a Hate Crime.
I remember going through St. Louis on a road trip with parents and grandparents back in 1962 when I was 5, and seeing the arch. I later learned as an adult that construction of the arch did not begin until 1963.
I’m stretching the definition of “from childhood” a bit, but I have persistently “remembered” that Taco Bell in the 1970s (i.e., when I was in high school) sold refried pinto beans as a Frijole, as I recounted recently in the thread about making homemade enchiritos.
Well, I’ve examined dozens of online photos of menus and ads and apparently it simply ain’t so. Always appears as Frijoles, plural, which makes sense, whereas Frijole, singular, does not. And yet it definitely got ensconced in my memory precisely because the name didn’t make much sense and I thought it was silly (“…as if you’re buying a single bean!”). Damned if I know how that got into my head that way.
Some people have very clear memories of Mandela dying a couple of decades before he did, of the authors of the beloved picture books being named “Berenstein”, and of the movie Big ending with the love interest becoming a little girl. The only reasonable explanation for all of these memories is that they’ve accidentally slipped into our dimension from a slightly different alternate timeline. In that timeline, the Arch was apparently also built earlier than in ours.
I have an ironclad memory from my mid adulthood that turned out to be pretty wrong. I distinctly remember a T intersection in Orlando that doesn’t exist, since I have looked at all T intersections in Orlando of that size and none of them fit that description, even on “show former years” on Google Street View.
I must have been melding a lot of separate T intersections together since I can find each individual component in several places, but not one matching all of them. I just remember feeling so good when I was at that particular intersection because it meant that I was traveling back from the gaming store and the traffic was always great and unhurried. And I remember finding that intersection again on Google Maps. I must have been misremembering that entire sequence of events since I can’t find the right one, especially one that is near a game store
I can find lots of T intersections that have:
A white or concrete wall on the other side rather than a tiny entranceway to housing or a strip mall,
Old school small sidewalks, visibly old and close to the road,
A bank on one side and a small strip mall on the other,
At least 4 lanes on the side of the road approaching the T, and
Not a whole lot of shade.
But not all of those combined. Especially one that also matches the emotional space of returning from a shopping trip toward an old built up area, which would place the intersection somewhere near Winter Park proper, but the closest ones I can find to my memory are east of Winter Park on Aloma and also in Winter Springs, which don’t match the memory of how I would have gotten there.
On the plus side, I have learned that there are a lot of T intersections where two medium sized roads meet in Orlando. I thought that I might have been misremembering the intersection from another city so I tried to find T intersection at other cities, but there aren’t a lot of them that even fit the size let alone the rest of the description.
i USED TO very clearly recall watching CBS Sunday Morning when we lived in Manhattan Kansas. Then I researched it years later and found that the show debuted in 1979. we moved away from Kansas in August 1977. sigh.
