A few mornings ago on the school run, I pulled up at a stoplight behind a car festooned with colorful stickers. One of them caught my eye and made me laugh. “Hey, guys, that’s funny,” I said to my passengers, “Look, the sign says — oh, wait, no it doesn’t.”
“It says ‘Pray for Priests,’ ” said a daughter. “Why is that funny?”
“It’s not,” I said a little sheepishly. I had misread it. I had thought it said “Pray for Pixies.”
“I do that all the time!” said another daughter. “The sign says one thing and I read another!”
As we drove on, I fell to thinking about how often it happens, that we get wrong something that seems to be plainly before us — and how whatever we think we are seeing can linger in memory as the thing that really happened when we’re actually getting it wrong.
What’s true of signs, like mine featuring the (doubly) nonexistent pixies, is also true of song lyrics. Unfortunately, it’s also true of more important things, such as traffic accidents, late-night talks and family stories.
Not long ago, I had to patch things up with a dear friend after a dinner conversation went badly wrong. It was only when we cleared the air that we discovered how dramatically we had misunderstood each other. We’d both had right on our sides, and also a bit of wrong, but the really interesting thing was that our versions of events were absolutely complete and distinct in our memories — yet they didn’t agree.
The incident reminded me of another friend’s frustration, some time ago, when she tried to determine what had happened during a tough time in her family’s life.
Some twenty years earlier, her grandmother had been dying in the hospital. My friend had clear memories of what happened immediately after the death, but she was foggy about a few details of the day itself. So she rang up her sister.
Her sister had clear memories, too, but in crucial respects they didn’t match my friend’s recollections. Mystified, she rang up her parents. Both her mother and her father had completely incongruent notions of how events had unfolded. In fact, not one person’s memory conformed to anyone else’s. Putting together an accurate picture of that trying time was like attempting to solve a puzzle using pieces from five different boxes. And yet all five of them had been there at the hospital. They were eyewitnesses, and none of their testimonies harmonized. It’s a wonder that people agree on as much as they do, considering.
As we arrived at school that morning, meanwhile, the ten-year-old piped up that she sure was looking forward to her birthday (which is in the summer) because she was eager to receive a certain present.
“Well, honey, presents are usually a surprise.”
“Yes, but you promised you’d give me one for my eleventh birthday,” she said.
“No I didn’t,” I said, “I said you weren’t allowed to have one until you were eleven. That’s not the same thing.”
“Oh, but you did,” she said. “You promised. I remember what you said, exactly.”
See what I mean?
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
