Our Depressingly Failing Memories

I have known my friend Gary for well over thirty years, through our membership in the Alexandria Harmonizers and singing together in a quartet for a while in that time.  We actually discovered more in common as the years went on, and I gained a great deal of respect for him professionally as I came to understand his skills as a communicator, and as a coach of those needing to speak and communicate better.  His ideas are worth hearing.

We don't see each other these days, living in different states, but I had to call him to pick his brain about a friendly matter the other day, and we caught up on things.  One thing, as it turned out, was that he didn't know I wrote this site every day, and I committed to send him an email with a link to it, and some links to favorite columns of mine.

One, of course, was "Adieu and God Bless, Santa Claus", which I wrote a few years back, on the passing of my first college roommate and fraternity brother Randy, a friend from Marion, South Carolina.  I think I sent Gary maybe 7-8 links, and then after I sent them I thought perhaps I might want to go back and read them again, since I might have written something I'd need to explain (or apologize for).

Well, I didn't think I had written anything offensive, and indeed I hadn't, but I made an interesting discovery.  In "Adieu and God Bless", I made a passing reference to a friend of his from high school who had gone to Harvard (we were at MIT nearby, of course), and who had stopped by our fraternity house once.

Now I have read that piece I wrote maybe thirty times.  It was read aloud at his funeral in 2015, and it wasn't all that long ago that I read it again, prior to last night.  But I was sitting on the couch last night reading it again, when I stopped at the reference to the friend at Harvard.  Wait a minute, I thought with a startled pause, that wasn't Randy's friend! The Harvard fellow -- and I even remembered his name -- was the high school friend of Kevin, a different fraternity classmate from South Carolina.

In other words, I had written, and then repeatedly read, an account of a friendship from 46 years previously, without realizing it was simply incorrect in identifying a person.  I was sure enough of my account to put it on the Internet, where everything is always 100% accurate, as we know.  Didn't give it another thought for three years.

How are those decades-old memories, we ask ourselves?  I had no sooner made that self-revelation about the Harvard friend, when my mind made the easy leap to the Brett Kavanaugh hearings filling our news this week.  I turned to my best girl and told her what I had discovered, and that apparently my memory was a bit leakier -- in fact, more deceptive than leaky -- than I had realized.

This past week we have been hearing allegations that have been of incidents that supposedly happened 35 years ago, and for which nothing was reported at the time.  In Dr. Christine Ford's case, her memory was inadequate to identify a year, a location, nor how she arrived at, or left, the site of the incident she alleges happened.

Since she was 15, she would have to have gotten a ride from someone thereafter, and that person would have known something happened.  The perfect corroborator, it would be, which makes the lack of that name rather convenient for those trying to keep the allegations nebulous and unprovable.  How 'bout that.

Our memories are funny things.  They keep bits and pieces and, as my own recollection incident apparently showed, occasionally move those back and forth a bit when the incidents start getting decades layered over them.

When people's lives and careers are at stake, it's about time we recognized that.

Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
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