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My First Memory Remakes Itself
A long, long walk, alone and scared, but proud, along a stretch of highway….
“I remember walking alone along this endless road, this huge expanse, rough and black. I was very young and very scared. But I had to do it. I think you told me to do it.”
“Walking along a road? I wouldn’t have let you walk by yourself anywhere at 2 years old,” says my mother.
“It is my first memory,” I repeat. But she’s right. She would never have put me in any danger. “Well, maybe this is a made-up memory. We do have those— like Piaget’s memory of being kidnapped when he was 2.”
When she looks puzzled, I say: “Jean Piaget, the child-development psychologist?” I see I have to explain. “When he was a baby, Piaget was in his stroller on a walk with his babysitter when a man tried to kidnap him. The babysitter kept that from happening even though the man hit her. Throughout his childhood, Piaget said he could literally see the policeman who showed up with a white baton, the kidnapper running away — the whole scene. Then, when he was 15, he found out the babysitter had made up the entire story to try and get a reward from his parents for keeping him safe. So much for memory. Piaget called this sort of thing reconstructed memory.”
“Well, if you aren’t reconstructing a memory, if you actually were walking along a road…
