I once recounted a story my mother had told me about a storm during which her mother sang "Nearer, My God, To Thee" as she marched around the wood stove in their dirt-floored home in the Ozarks. I was shocked and furious when my mother accused me of lying and denied any such event, including having ever lived in a dirt-floored house. I was certain I had heard that story many times. I did not, then, understand what was going on and was angry that she was changing the story to discredit me.
At a much advanced age when I have heard spouses, siblings, dear friends, parents and children contradict each others' versions of both important and trivial events, I understand how unreliable memory is. I've heard a friend recount an adventure that her brother claimed was his. My close friend and associate and I have totally different memories of how and where we learned about 9/11, but we both remember that we were together. My daughter and I have completely different memories of the events surrounding an abrupt switch from one swimming pool to another having to do with racial policies. My husband and my two brothers rafted down the Colorado River together. As I remember the telling originally, the raft in front of them turned over. But now it seems two of them remember that it was their raft that overturned. I could go on and on explaining how I have learned through observation that we don't know which memories are accurate and which are not. I would never lie to my friends and family, nor they to me, but their memories and stories often don't match mine.
Wallace Stegner's wise protagonist in "Crossing to Safety" observes that about half his memory is invention. And there is a whole body of science that supports this and tries to explain the hows and whys of memory's fickleness.
So, I will not cast the first stone at Brian Williams or Hillary Clinton over their recollections about war zones, and I will have less respect for those self-righteous zealots who do. Just from a practical standpoint, neither of them could ever expect to lie about well-documented events and get away with it. The only logical explanation is that the memory invents, distorts, minimizes and enhances the events of our lives.
Ruth Ann Cioci lives in Minneapolis.
