This most likely a false memory, but is it mine, or my parents?
When I was very young, maybe 4-5, I went with my dad to the neighbors. I was playing on a straw pile, and the next thing I remember was being driven to the hospital. I remember the drive, and the concern, but I had no idea what happened, or what treatment I had, if any.
So decades later, after my dad had died, it was bugging me, and I asked my mom what happened that I had to be taken to the hospital. Did I have an allergic reaction? Did I land on my head? What? She said that never happened. Did she forget her one and only son’s near-death experience? Maybe dad never told her? The memory is still vivid 60 years later, but now they’re both gone. I’ll never know for sure.
Or maybe it did happen, and your memories were accurate, but it was for something much less severe than your five-year-old self assumed, something minor enough that your mother had no particular reason for it to stand out.
It could be. When you have no basis for comparison, you have no way to file the memory correctly. At that age, everything you do, see and experience is the first time.
I swear I use the verb TO CONFLATE at least once a day these days. Mostly apologizing for conflating two events together in my memory.
Now that I’ve read up more on how memories are stored, I’m not surprised. They aren’t pages in a file cabinet that you pull out, they’re a jumble of pictures and sounds and snippets of ransom notes that you piece together on the fly when you’re trying to tell someone about an adventure from your childhood.
When I was 4 years old, my parents hired a Santa to come by the house and deliver presents. Apparently he was a local elderly guy who loved doing this sort of thing. We have a few pictures of his visit, so I know that it did happen. But in my childhood memories, I always remembered him coming down our staircase to deliver the presents which, as it turns out, is pretty hard to do in a single-story home.
Yep. Memories are unreliable and subject to change from outside influence. I made this point about very old cold cases with some witness with a 30 year old memory, but other posters insist that memory is perfect.
Basically, every time you recall a memory, it essentially gets “re-recorded.” So if you inadvertently add a spurious detail, or conflate it with a different memory, or something you read, or something that was suggested to you, the memory gets “re-recorded” incorrectly, and the next time you recall it, it may be different from what you originally remembered. And this continues every time you recall it like a game of telephone.
This is one reason why the practice of investigators leading witnesses in a crime is so harmful—like showing them a photo of a single suspect. Witnesses have been put on the stand at a trial and sworn that they saw an accused person committing a crime, whereas it later shown (such as by incontrovertible evidence such as DNA testing) that their memories were compromised by ignorant or unscrupulous police investigators.
Along the same lines as Big and other mistaken memories, I for years had a cherished memory of Julia Child dropping a chicken on the floor on her show The French Chef, and then picking it up and cleaning it off, and saying something witty about how these are things only the cook knows and what the guests (or family) don’t know won’t hurt them, It was in the very early black and white days of the show, sometime after it started in 1962, I was a teen watching in the evening after dinner with my mother, and we looked at each other and laughed and laughed.
Apparently I am not the only one to have this memory, but also apparently it never happened. Or so claims every historical and personal resource today.
I remember some forgotten TV program from the sixties singing the cast credits with the name “Morey Am-ster-dam!” However recently I’ve been seeing the reruns of the “Red Skelton” program–and that was the actual program. For some seasons they had an introductory musical number that introduced the guests, and that’s the way they introduced Red’s musical director David “The Stripper” Rose. . . “Da-vid Rooooose, and his or-ches-tra!” Exact melody. (Although maybe Morey was a guest at some point, and I really did hear it with him.)
I had a clear memory of watching the family dog get run over and killed. Years later I recounted this, and my mother said that wasn’t how it happened at all.
Possibly, but my mother also watching and laughing with me was a strong part of the memory. Also I almost never watched SNL (which would have been later anyway), but I possibly might have seen a sketch repeated somewhere. As the point has been made, nothing with memories is certain.
A single bean would be a “Frijol”.
Singular “Frijol”
Plural “Frijoles”
In Spanish words ended in a consonant receive an “E” and an “S” when being pluralized, so “Frijol”->“Frijoles”, “Federal”-> “Federales” (there is no such thing as a “Federale”)