“I’m sorry you are so afraid, honey, but everything is going to be okay.” My mother kneaded the back of my neck with her right hand. The knuckles of the left one looked white compared to the tan vinyl that covered the steering wheel. We must have been sitting in Dad’s old Plymouth. It was my first day of kindergarten. I remember it like it was yesterday.
I should ask Dad about that old car. What was the model? How long did he drive it? I think he sold it for scrap when I was about eight.
I almost couldn’t believe it, but Dad said that he was the one who drove on my first day of school. He says my mother was riding in the back seat, and since it was my special day, I was up front next to him. He wasn’t sure what car I was talking about. I’m going to ask Larry what he remembers.
Larry is sure that the car with the tan interior was a Chevy Impala. “It was forest green, and it was what they called a ‘hardtop.’ That means that when you rolled down both windows on the same side, you had one huge open space that went from the post next to the front windshield all the way back to the little triangular window next to the back seat. That car was a monster!”
“I’ll have to take your word for it.” Larry was always a car guy. He went on to tell me a long story about taking seven friends to the beach in that car the summer he got his driver’s license.
Dad called this morning to tell me he’d found a photo of the Chevy, but it was blue, not green. I called Larry back, and he said, “Oh, yeah, my friend Billy drove a forest green car. I think it might have been a Caprice.”
I told him what had gotten me started asking about the car, about my crystal-clear memory of that fall morning at Emerson Elementary.
“Hm. You’re six years behind me in school, so you would have started kindergarten in, what? 1980?”
“Yeah, that math seems to work.”
“Then Dad was driving a white Oldsmobile with a red interior,” Larry said. “He never let Mom drive that car. He said it was too big for her to handle, but it was really just because that car was his baby. And when—”
I thought maybe the line had gone dead. “Are you still there?” I said to the silent line.
“Yeah, sorry. I was just thinking. The tan interior. Mom in the front seat, the way she kept one hand on the steering wheel even when she was sitting in a parking lot. Dude, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I think you’re remembering my first day of school.”
Note: The prompt for today was the lead line, “I’m sorry you are so afraid.”
My inspiration for what to do with the line was a podcast I listened to today. It was a 2006 story about “stolen” memories—a phenomenon wherein people appropriate memories they’ve heard from others, or to which they were merely witnesses, and incorporate the recollections into their own personal narratives. (Read more about “stolen” memories.)
So I decided to attempt a story about the unreliability of memory. Or maybe this actually happened. I forget.
© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick
Hi, Ed…This is a delightful story with an unexpected twist at the end…I wonder what my girls would say about their first day of school…my memory has never been great, and I don’t seem to be able to recall minute details of things that happened 40-some years ago…but they did both go to kindergarten!
Will see what else appears when I click on more “stolen memories”! (Are these exercises another series from the teacher with whom you wrote the last group of stories?)
Hugs,
“Gayle’s mom”
The “stolen“ memories link in the note at the end takes you to a site that reports on the research into the phenomenon.
And yes, I’m participating in another 50/50 course with Max Regan. 50 pages in 50 days. I’m glad you’re back!
Hi gang! This reads to me like on the surface it is a story about you, but underneath it’s really a story about Larry – how your brother loves cars and what he did with them. I love the bounce back and forth between the various calls from one relative to the next. That makes it interesting. Cool sense of building and partially unbuilding and rebuilding the story as it goes along. I liked it! G.