After reading Lesson 9, I started thinking back about a few events it brought up. One being was the September 11 attacks, the other would be my childhood home. At first, I thought I had a pretty good recollection on these events. But after reading more into the lesson, I started to wonder if maybe I did recall these events correctly or not.
I will start with my childhood home. I would like to focus more so on my Grandparents’ house. I always felt confident in my memory of this house due to its out-of-date colors. The house for most of my childhood had yellow paint on the outside and on the inside each room was painted in various vibrant shades. I felt that such unusual color choices only helps in aiding this memory rather than my placing other colors in place. Then I realized that when they finally changed paint to grey, I found that simple change blurred the rest of the memory for me. I still, however, remember the basement vividly, or at least so I thought. My Grandmother absolutely loved Frank Sinatra. So much so that she had multiple posters of his portraits all over the basement walls. When I think back to the placement of the posters, I confuse their placement. I remember the posters themselves but don’t recall how exactly they were arranged. I feel that if I overthink it too much, I might form a new memory. A memory in which wherever I decided to place the posters might ruin how I may remember the basement permanently, like it stated in the reading.
The second event would be September 11, 2001. I feel that I can recall this day a bit easier due to the fact that I live in New York, my mother worked in Manhattan during that day, and McDonald’s toys. I will explain all this in a second, let me start with the first one. I woke up around 9:00 AM. This was at the time when beepers were very popular. I sent my mother a page and waited for her to call me from work. She finally called me, to inform me to wake up my father, and put on the news. She stating that the Twin Towers were attacked. I woke my father up and showed him the news, for the rest of the day, I ended up watching the news broadcasts’ and received updates from my mother’s whereabouts throughout the attack. She was close enough to the towers to see the attacks from her office window. Even with the attacks in the city going on, my mother made her way to a McDonalds to purchase me some toys that they were offering. At this time, I was into a Lego toy line known as Bionicle. McDonalds started to include their own spin of this toy with their Kids’ meals. My mother, even with the 9/11 events going on, she still went out of her way to get the toys that I was missing from the collection. I felt that with these factors in mind I should be able to recall everything quite well. I suppose most of the day is blurred out, but I do think the most vivid parts are the essential parts. I suppose you can say this mostly reflects the flashbulb memory.
In conclusion, it’s hard to say if your memories are truly accurate. Sure you have other people who may have been there as well to talk about the memories with you. But what if their memory differs from yours? Who can really be accurate? I think back to times where I reminisce with other people and have that, “Oh yeah!” moment, but now I wonder if that, “Oh yeah!” moment is now a newly formed false memory.