"The Great Remembering"

Can you remember a personal incident two ways?

I’m like the police about that.  After they catch a suspect the accumulated evidence suggests is the perpetrator, they stop looking for anyone else, working instead to amass corroborating evidence against the person currently under arrest.  It’s like, “Who needs two defendants?”

And in fact, if there weretwo (or more) incarcerated suspects, they would both (or all) likely get off, their wily attorneys pointing to the otherincarcerated suspect(s) as proof of exonerating “reasonable doubt.”  Things are easier when it’s just one.

“What are you in for?”

“I killed Jennifer Shmedlap.”

“Me too!”

That’s just too crazy.

Since this story is not about that, however, I shall proceed no further in that particular direction. But don’t think I couldn’t.

Anyway… where was I?

Oh yeah.

I am unable to recall one personal anecdote two ways.  Of course, if there was another participant involved, you can bet you’ll hear, 

“I remember that differently.”

Leading to dueling narratives concerning the same story – the other participant’s version, and the your own accurate, actualversion.

Bringing us, circuitously, to a recent, listened-to segment of NPR’s “This American Life”, in which the participants in a life-changing experience retain differing “takeaways”, notof the facts of story itself, but on how they personally interpreted the outcome. 

The story itself goes something like this.  (Which means now my“Memory Mechanism” jumps into the mix.  So there’s that.)

Ms. Ames, a proactive substitute teacher in an underperforming public school, spots Emir, a precocious Bosnian refugee, and, sensing his “genius potential”, shepherds his transfer to a prominent private school, from which he matriculates to Harvard, and on to an honored career as a respected economist.

That’s her story.

What’s Emir’s story?

A scrappy Bosnian refugee, stealing a book from which he plagiarizes an essay, catches the eye of a great substitute teacher, who maneuvers him to a loftier academic environment, and the rest is “onward-and-upward” personal history.

After years of separation, This American Life brings Emir and Ms. Ames together, where they revisit their shared experience, though with widely divergent interpretative understandings.

Emir sees himself as having been “lucky”, a chance encounter with a rescuing teacher paving the way to his ultimate success.

Ms. Ames, on the other hand, attributes Emir’s ‘Success Story”, not to luck, but to his dazzling, natural ability.

During their reunion, Emir steadfastly resists Ms. Ames’s alternate version of events.  The broadcast further informs us that, the following day, despite what has transpired, an unfazed Emir clings to his original interpretation. 

And there you have it.

A contrary perspective has zero effect.

Emir remembers exactly the way he wants to, his recollection dependent, not on logical reason or on alternate viewpoints,

But on how he likes the story to go.
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Belated Apology: I kept a list of which pub names were real and which were made up, and then I lost it.  I no longer remember which was which.  Though I believe the “spectacles” one was real.)