My mother once told me that there was a period of time, when I was somewhere between two and three years old and our family was living in a small apartment in the Bronx – one of those old New York apartments with the really high ceilings – when she started to observe a puzzling phenomenon: Every day the ceiling in the bathroom would become wet. There didn’t seem to be a leak from upstairs, just that wet ceiling every day, way up overhead, beyond reach.
As my mother tells it, one day she was wondering aloud what might be causing this strange phenomenon, when my little self piped up brightly “I show you mommy!” Apparently, I then proceeded to clamber up and stand on the toilet seat. From there I reached over, turned on the tap in the sink full blast, and carefully stuck one little forefinger into the emerging stream of water. This caused a high powered jet of water to shoot straight up and douse the ceiling.
I have no memory of doing any such thing, but my mother is very clear and confident in her memory of it. And that makes sense – from her perspective this event would have been very funny, whereas I wasn’t old enough yet to be in on the joke, so it wouldn’t have been likely to stand out in my memory. Although the whole episode certainly suggests that I was some kind of little scientist, even way back then.
Such indirect memories fascinate me, because they operate by reflection, ping-ponging from one person to another. I now have a very vivid picture in my mind of this event – a picture that was almost certainly planted there years later, from my mom’s description. It’s strange, isn’t it? I “remember” something from my own life only because my mother did. I wonder how many of our memories are really second-hand, and yet over the years have become transformed in our recollection, until we can actually see them in our mind’s eye?