Not Even Not Zen 377: Biomythography - Note 114: Correct But Wrong Memories

Correct But Wrong Memories

I’m standing in the living room of a fourth floor apartment in Frankfurt. From my angle relative to the furniture, and from the cushions and the rug, I’m about three years old. I turn toward my father in three, waddling steps. He's standing in the open floorspace past the couch.

My father is wearing dress pants, a buttoned shirt and a vest. He waves once to get my attention. When he’s got it, he says something he has said many times before.

“Vo bist du mama?”

He has encouraged me to memorize the phrase, I know. And I have. I know it's my turn. I’ve memorized an answering phrase.

“Mama ist in der Schule!” I pronounce. 

This is a compound memory in the sense that I can feel it happened more than once. Many times, he prompted me with the phrase, often in our home. The prompts happened slightly differently each time but they had a similar cadence. In my place during the return phrase of the ritual, I almost always I responded in the same, sing-song voice. The details of the individual events may be lost. They have been compounded into one archetypal memory. There's something slightly different about this one, a reason it stands out. The apartment has warm light from the lampshades.

Off to my left side, during this one instance, someone corrects my father. It must be one of my German nannies. I don’t remember her face, just the sound of a voice off to the side. And I remember my father trying out the new words she prompted and not liking them. 

Now that I have examined some German phrases, I realize why someone, most likely my nanny, was correcting my father.

The correct German phrase would have been, “Wo bist diene Mutter?” 

That doesn’t mean that my memory of my father's repeated phrase is incorrect. I think, in this case, I may have a correct memory of something repeated many times with the words incorrect. 

I've been a parent myself and I can reflect a little on how casually I approached some conversations with my children. I think my father had learned some German, very informally, and had either picked up local Frankfurt slang or he had decided to use his own blend of English and German to teach me.

"Vo bist du mama?"

The phrase illustrates a point, to me. No matter how careful I am with my memories, I am still led astray by them. Aside from how my process of recall is flawed, even a very faithful memory may in some way be corrupted slightly by my impressions of the humans of the time.

As a child, I learned many things that were wrong. I was taught wrong facts by trusted teachers, by textbooks, by uncles or cousins or other relatives, and sometimes by dear friends. I have tended not to examine those memories in light of my newer knowledge. That’s good for the process of faithful memory. 

It helps my recall to be faithful to the child I was. But it doesn’t make those wrong facts become true. It only points up how little most of us knew at the time and, probably, how little we know now.