I know my memory is not always infallible. I’m sure there are a few occasions in which I’ve forgotten to buy toothpaste at the grocery store, to lock the car door, the face of a person with whom I once worked, or one of those things we make with sounds from our mouths (sometimes on the tip of one’s tongue) and use to form sentences. Usually though, I remember important things with quite a bit of detail.

My dream, for example, in which I had organized the first team of European immigrants to build an extremely high wall on the edge of a cliff in what would some day, somehow, become Quebec. Of course we needed this wall because we had to protect our village in the sky from the soon-to-be-invading British. Fortunately only Beavis and Butthead scaled the cliff and they only wanted a bong-hit from us.

Tonight I opened the refrigerator door and noticed that the light did not light. “Julie, look at that–the light didn’t go on.” Julie looked at me, incredulous, and said that it has never worked. In fact, she claims that during the three years we have lived in this apartment, the refrigerator light has always been broken. I don’t believe that. Why would I suddenly notice that something, which has never worked, stopped working? That doesn’t make sense to me. Usually something has to change from my regular experience to call itself to my attention–usually that happens in a span of time shorter than three years. I of course shot back that, no, in fact Ms. Julie is mistaken and her powers of
observation are just not as well-honed as mine. We argued about this for a bit. Generally she laughed at my explanations for the light going out.

The refrigerator does have a lightbulb in it, so it could have worked at some point. To get to my question here, the stereotype seems to be that women have better memories than men. Is this true? Or is my current theory better…

I think perhaps Julie has told me that my memory is bad so many times, that now if I want to contradict her I have no recourse. She can simply say that she is correct because of course, my memory is no good. What if the reality is that her memory is bad. What if every time she remembers something incorrectly she just tells me that I’m actually the one remembering wrong. She writes history to her point of view every time she forgets something and I eat it up because I trust what she tells me. I’ve begun to believe that I have a bad memory. Bad memory -vs- good, of course I can’t argue with the one who has a good memory.

More important, why must she mislead me about the refrigerator light? How can I count on things really taking place in the world, if a woman can so easily cause me to doubt three years of that glowing frost?

This was published here on Tuesday, 30 November 1999 at 0:00 and is filed under Jehosephat Cream's Volcano Scene. You may leave a response, or trackback from your own site.