“The memory is a cooperative animal, eager to please; what it cannot supply it occasionally invents, sketching carefully to fill in the blanks.”
– Lawrence Block, A Stab in the Dark
Let’s talk about stories, and how good it feels to tell a doozy.
Have you ever had a story so good that you hear a friend tell it as though they were there? They might even insert themselves as the Protagonist.
Protagonist is story telling lingo for lead character.
I thought maybe my friends were the only ones who did this, so I went hunting around. It’s a thing, and it’s called a borrowed memory.
In 2015 a study was done on borrowed memories. More than half of respondents had heard someone tell their own story as if the event had happened to the storyteller.
Jackpot.
This is what I’ve been looking for. Story thieves are out there inserting themselves into other people’s hard-earned memories.
Some stories are just that good.
I’ve told the story of my grandfather being shot down in World War II, but I never made the mistake of inserting myself in the bullet riddled B-24 Liberator.
But how about a story that is more plausible? Like this little ditty.
In the late 90s a battle was brewing. A battle between swim clubs in the South Puget Sound.
As legend has it, the Normandy Park Swim Club (NPSC) had an axe to grind against their valley dwelling rivals at the Kent Swim and Tennis Club (KSTC). Tennis envy? The boys of NPSC set out after curfew on a sweltering summer night. The mission: cover KSTC with enough toilet paper to wipe all the butts in Western Washington.
The plan was perfect, almost too perfect, until halfway through the job those all too familiar red and blue lights came flashing down Woodland Way, police cars screeching to a halt in the club parking lot.
Kids scattered into the woods, K-9 units were deployed, and officers pursued on foot to track down the culprits and bring them to justice.
I won’t ruin the ending but that is the start of a story I’ve heard annually for over 20 years. It seems like an event I’d be at. I can almost see myself scaling fences and climbing trees to escape the officers, and truth be told I wish I had been in attendance.
But I missed that grand adventure.
For those that were there, they all had their own singular point of view, but the way they all tell the story has a bit of delusion as well, and it’s something fun called collaborative remembering.
That moment when everyone circles up at the end of the night and shares their account will also alter everyone’s recollection of the events. If it’s a long-term friendship, the kind where you sit around the campfire and retell stories, the memory for all parties will change. You produce some consensus of how things went down, you’ll embellish the good parts, minimize the embarrassing parts, and when the group gets that one shining moment to share with an outsider, it’s like everyone is part of some synchronized dramatical reading of the once chaotic scenario.
Dude, I’m telling you, our brains are wild.
Memory theft is real, and memory theft is real confusing, because we don’t even know we are doing it. In one version you borrow a memory. Borrowed memory doesn’t sound so bad, you know it’s not yours and your brain agrees, you return it when you’re done. Like me and my grandfather’s war stories. But then there are memory adoptions, you actually believe the events happened to you.
That story about rolling a bowling ball down the massive hill on 160th? The one where you get to the bottom only to see the ball pass you going the other direction, up the hill? Love that story. It’s a classic, and I know it’s a classic because I’ve heard it from at least nine different people. I’m fairly sure I was there. But I don’t remember anyone having a car that seated nine, so at least a few of us are adopting.
And I guess that’s okay. After further reading, it all seems like a natural human trait.
So, what am I going to do with these friends that have been caught stealing?
I suppose they are only stealing the stories that are worthy, so maybe it’s a compliment to have your memories borrowed or adopted. As long as the rightful owners can have them back every once and a while.
Some stories are just that good.
What do you think?