Resurrecting Old Memories by Connie Berry

 

Last week I had a long telephone conversation with my best friend from college. We haven’t seen each other in more than twenty years, but she and I were very close during our college years and spent almost a year in Europe together, attending classes and traveling between terms in her little baby blue Karmann Ghia. She taught me to drive a stick shift. I introduced her to my relatives in Norway. Long before there was such a thing as the internet, smart phones, or streaming music, we bought a small record player and several albums. We wore those albums out--literally.

It’s fun looking back. It’s also interesting to me as a writer because as we were sharing our memories (many decades later), we realized that the moments we recollected weren’t always the same.

For example, she reminded me of driving in the hills above Monaco. A crazy driver overtook us on a blind curve. If a car had been coming from the opposite direction, we would all have been killed. My response (as she remembered it) was to say, “I refuse to die in Monaco!” 

I don’t remember that at all.

Then I reminded her that we met an elderly woman in our Monte Carlo pensione who claimed to be of Russian nobility. We thought she was making it up until she escorted us into the private, inner rooms at the famous casino. The attendants bowed to her, and she pointed out other Russian ex-pats ("That’s Count So-and-So").

My friend has no memory of that elderly woman. What???

Time flies, and memories differ. Writers can use that fact to create ambiguity and to obscure clues in a murder investigation. Police will tell you that even immediately after a crime, eyewitness accounts will differ,  After many years have passed, people may have completely different memorites of something they both witnessed. Is one of them lying or is it simply a matter of human psychology? 

What is it that cements a memory in one person’s mind but not another’s?

Right now I’m playing with this concept in my WIP.

How about you? How could you use the fallibility of human memory in your stories?