Human memory is peculiarly unreliable–but verifiably unreliable. The science is there, and it’s pretty good science, too. In his excellent book, On Being Certain, neurologist Robert A. Burton describes the Challenger study: Within a day of the Challlenger disaster, a psychologist asked 106 of his students to write down precisely where they were when the explosion occurred, how they heard about it, and how they felt at that moment. Two and a half years later (hardly a lifetime, though significant for the young) the students were interviewed, and asked to recount the details of what they had written down and given to their professor. Fewer than ten percent of the students recalled all of the details correctly as they had written them. A quarter of the students’ memories were significantly different, and over half had some major differences with what they had recorded at the time.
Thirty months–and an event that stands in many people’s memories (including my own) as one of the most striking events of their lifetime. Intriguingly, even when confronted with their original notes written the day after the event, many students with conflicting memories insisted that their current memories were correct. As one said, “That’s my handwriting, but that’s not what happened.”
Egad.
I’ve been struck in recent years with an increasing number of things that happened that I don’t remember, things I remember incorrectly, and (disturbingly) things that I remember vividly that simply didn’t happen at all. I introduced this topic with a simple example: A friend of mine found a college-era manuscript of a short story I wrote that I just don’t remember writing. Getting old, I guess. The bitchy part is that it’s a pretty good story, and it was completely outside my usual aliens-and-starships turf. Somehow I would have thought it would make a more vivid impression on me.
But we forget things. Odder are things we remember vividly that we in fact remember wrong. Forty-three years ago, when I was in eighth grade, I remember talking to a girl in my class and stumbling on the fact that her father had died. Forty years later, I ran into her again at our grade-school reunion, and it came out that it was her mother and not her father who had died. The original conversation was painful, and I remember painful things very well–you’d think I would have remembered it more accurately. In a different conversation with the same girl, I asked her what high school she would be attending that fall. I remember her indicating one Catholic girls’ school, but in fact (again, verified forty years later) she had attended another. She had never even considered the school that I remember her saying, because it was a fair ways off and the other school was within walking distance.
But I remember both conversations to this day, with the sort of clarity one would expect of a bright if nerdy kid attempting to make conversation with a girl he was a little sweet on. It took considerable courage to talk to her at all, and those are the things of which solid memories are made.
Except when they’re not, I guess.
It was that particular incident that started me looking critically at my own memories, especially those that could be verified somehow. I found a lot of little things that didn’t add up, including a few “flashbulb” memories (as psychologists call them) that one would expect would be vivid and indelible forever. The most recent one is something I chased down just the other day: I vividly remember the first time I kissed Carol–who wouldn’t?–and I remember that it was after we started school in the fall, which would be at least five or six weeks after we met at the end of July. Well, on the back of her 3 X 5 card in my teen-years telephone index box (which still exists among piles of oddments I’m amazed that I still have) is the note “kissed 8/16/69.” That was only two weeks after our most fateful meeting, and school was still another two weeks off. (Remember when school started after Labor Day?)
If I don’t remember that accurately, well, what hope for the rest of it? What kind of life did I actually live?
Stand by: The weirdest part is yet to come.
While passing through western Nebraska, we stopped at a 
1969 gave us the Summer of Love, though we (and I especially) didn’t know it at the time. Back then I thought of it as The Summer We Landed on the Moon, and to a lesser extent The Summer I Filled the Garage with Broken Radios and TVs. It was the summer I turned 17, between junior and senior years at Lane Technical High School in Chicago. It was the summer my big home-made 10″ Newtonian telescope finally (after three years of hard work) saw first light. It was the summer I got my first job, washing dishes at the Walgreen’s Grill at Harlem and Foster Avenues. It all seemed dazzling the way that most things do to young people who haven’t drunk the corrosive kool-aid of cynicism, because so much of it was new to us.
I was nerdy but not asocial; in fact, as I progressed through my (all-male) high school, I became a sort of alpha geek, and was president of the Lane Tech Amateur Astronomical Society for two years, a position that carried considerable prestige and a coterie of like-minded and enthusiastic followers. I finished our basement on Clarence Avenue in knotty pine paneling when I was 14, and spent a lot of time down there writing science fiction, building telescopes, and tinkering with electronics. At the time I considered loneliness to be part of the landscape of ordinary life. My best friend Art Krumrey and I took long walks and talked endlessly about having girlfriends without achieving any remarkable insights. I’ll admit that Art had a better grip on it than I did, and the first real date I ever went on was a blind outing with his first girlfriend’s best girlfriend, who in truth didn’t much care for what Art and Rosemary had handed her, and nothing came of it.
Carol was quieter than I, and a lot less eccentric. She pursued straight A’s with tremendous energy (managing to be double-promoted past third grade) and yet was described as “serene” by her classmates. She was grace under pressure, in spades: calm, precise, and capable of summoning focused enthusiasm without falling all over herself, as I sometimes did. Beyond academics (especially science) her two big interests were dance and drama, and she appeared in the major high school plays produced by her school all four years she was there. These were not casual, small-time things, but full-blown musical comedies, including The Boyfriend and My Fair Lady. I’ve seen professional theater that was done with less skill and cruder production values. She had plenty of poise but was quite shy, and while she spoke occasionally with boys in her neighborhood, she attended an all-girl Catholic high school, and didn’t mix a lot with the opposite sex. Her parents told her she could not date until she turned 16. The week after her 16th birthday, she went on her first date, with a boy from her neighborhood. Two weeks after her 16th birthday, well, there we were, and the world changed.
conversation, each for separate reasons not well understood, even by ourselves. Here was a boy who enjoyed talking, and could talk about all kinds of things–and here was a girl who enjoyed talking, and didn’t think conversation about astronomy and the mysteries of the fourth dimension were invariably the symptoms of derangement. Once again, it worked: We became fast friends, and although we went to conventional school dances and five or six weeks in shared our first kiss, all that went on between us existed within a matrix of friendship nourished by conversation, in person and in a stream of letters that flew back and forth across the three miles that separated us, on a more than weekly basis. Six months after we met, in the thick of a particularly intense conversation that has otherwise been forgotten, Carol told me that she loved me, and we both knew that it was true–not mere words stemming from giddy infatuation or social obligation, but something far more real than both, because they had emerged from genuine and unselfish friendship.
Everything else across forty years has proceeded from that simple foundation: Be friends, be patient, don’t smother, and talk about things. We’ve had arguments, including a couple of doozies, but once anger was spent, love flowed back in and started the conversation going again, so that healing could begin and the process of friendship continue.
