divergent family memories

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is there an event or events in your family's history for which the recollections of family members diverge in some significant way? do dinner conversations circle back to the contested event(s)? do these differing recollections suggest something profound about the way in which different family members view the world? does the resulting dissonance threaten to tear your family apart?

[[i have a gloriously mundane example: when i was about 11 my mom took me to see a performance of the musical "oklahoma!" in michigan city, indiana. in my recollection, my mom told me beforehand that it would be some kind of marxist retelling of dust bowl privation. i recall being a bit disappointed by what it turned out to be. this sometimes comes up--i don't really plan it-- when i gently accuse my mom of having raised me with a somewhat doctrinaire politics. my mom is always taken aback and insists with considerable vigor that she said no such thing, that she grew up knowing exactly what "oklahoma!" was. this sounds reasonable, but i swear to you that i remember her saying this. where else would this strange memory have come from?]]

― amateur!!st, Friday, 27 August 2004 18:42 (twenty-one years ago)

We lived in DC when Watergate and all that went down. My mom painted a sheet with a political slogan and hung it from the window. One night someone snuck in my mom's window [and removed it while she was sleeping]. For years, I thought the sheet was painted with the words "Nixon's assassinators live here" and that the FBI came and took the sheet down. She recently claimed that it said "Nixon's war kills" and that the night-time intruder was unconnected to the sheet and actually was just a perv who stole some of her underwear from her drawer.

― Maria D. (Maria D.), Friday, 27 August 2004 18:54 (twenty-one years ago)

Mom said it was because Dad always wanted to stay out late. Dad says it was because Mom wouldn't get off the damn couch.

― Pleasant Plains (Pleasant Plains), Friday, 27 August 2004 19:31 (twenty-one years ago)

i believed at around age 9 that i had, as a younger boy, accidentally let off the parking brake of a golf cart parked in family friends' driveway; it rolled down their steep driveway and smashed through the bay window of the house across the street.

this never happened.

― g--ff (gcannon), Friday, 27 August 2004 19:36 (twenty-one years ago)

most of them

― kephm (kephm), Friday, 27 August 2004 19:36 (twenty-one years ago)

Nothing spectacular in mine, but my friend, when young, had a pet rabbit that he vividly remembers seeing hopping away, never to return. At his parents' house for dinner, he recounted his version of poor bunnykins' flight. His parents started attempting to stifle giggles, before revealing that in fact, they had cooked his rabbit and eaten it for tea. This is true.

― emil.y (emil.y), Saturday, 28 August 2004 15:51 (twenty-one years ago)

My father insisted he never had a moustache until we found a photo that proved otherwise.

― Alba (Alba), Saturday, 28 August 2004 16:16 (twenty-one years ago)

I remember visiting an orphanage with my father, at about three or four years of age, and playing in the large front room with some of the children, while my father had some kind of meeting in the back. One day, about five years later as we drove past the building that I still believed we'd visited, I asked about our being there when I was younger. My father told me that it never happened.

― Kim (Kim), Saturday, 28 August 2004 16:36 (twenty-one years ago)

In a sinister kind of 'he's hiding something' way?

― Alba (Alba), Saturday, 28 August 2004 16:37 (twenty-one years ago)

I don't know!

― Kim (Kim), Saturday, 28 August 2004 16:38 (twenty-one years ago)

My brother was hit by lightning one summer. My sister swears he was hit twice that summer, but it was just once.

― Maria D. (Maria D.), Saturday, 28 August 2004 16:38 (twenty-one years ago)

Once, when I was about 6, the entire family sat down to a dinner of pot roast and I remember watching an episode of Dr. Who on the television while I ate my meal. I spouted off this random memory once to my sisters who swear I AM MAKING IT UP even though it's very mundane.

― Homosexual II (Homosexual II), Saturday, 28 August 2004 16:43 (twenty-one years ago)

THAT COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED, MANDEE.

― Alba (Alba), Saturday, 28 August 2004 16:45 (twenty-one years ago)

when i was about four, my father bought me a jumbo rocket pop (red, white, and blue ice) which my mother took from me at one point "for a taste." she bit the entire blue part off (the best, tastiest bit), and i had a tantrum which is legendary in my family to this day. it comes up a few times a year, and my mother and i argue over whether she took a small bite (her version) or chomped the whole thing (the truth). my father usually stays out of it but the last time he muttered, " i don't see why you had to take the kid's popsicle in the first place," before going to hide in his office. i see that as a vindication of some sort.

― lauren (laurenp), Saturday, 28 August 2004 16:49 (twenty-one years ago)

Parents should steal candy from kids more.

― Alba (Alba), Saturday, 28 August 2004 16:51 (twenty-one years ago)

Once, mine secretly emptied my (plastic Colonel Sanders) piggy bank and my bank account full of birthday money.

― Kim (Kim), Saturday, 28 August 2004 17:02 (twenty-one years ago)

My sister was in denial about her door-covering poster of Joey from NKOTB for the better half of a decade.

― CeCe Peniston (Anthony Miccio), Saturday, 28 August 2004 17:11 (twenty-one years ago)

While it was still there?

― Alba (Alba), Saturday, 28 August 2004 17:15 (twenty-one years ago)

I wish.

― CeCe Peniston (Anthony Miccio), Saturday, 28 August 2004 17:16 (twenty-one years ago)

During my freshman year of college she found a poster for his Stay The Same solo debut and put it on my door, adding the word "SLAVE" on his cheek a la Prince and writing something like "Anthony, why don't you call me no more? Please don't go, girl. You'll always have the right stuff. Love, Joey" on the side. When I reminded her that she actually spent a year or two with a Joey poster on her door by choice she loudly spazzed and only recently has begun to admit the verity of my claim.

― CeCe Peniston (Anthony Miccio), Saturday, 28 August 2004 17:18 (twenty-one years ago)

she even wrote "SLAVE" the same way Prince did (the L joined to the A). I was very impressed.

― CeCe Peniston (Anthony Miccio), Saturday, 28 August 2004 17:19 (twenty-one years ago)

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