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.<\/p>\n
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!”<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n
I have no memory of doing any such thing, but my mother is very clear and confident in her<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n
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? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading “Second-hand memories”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}