(Here’s me with my youngest nephew on a previous set in Olds – the artist of the mural took the picture!)
My nephews are so adorable. All four of them are clever and kind, and either in their 40s or inching much closer to that magic age. It was only a few years ago that I stopped slipping a $10 bill into their birthday cards. I mean, one of them is a school principal so I’m not thinking he missed it very much! Two others are business managers and the last one (literally, the youngest) works on a set production crew for some pretty well-known shows!
I’m really lucky that I get to see them all pretty often. Over Christmas, youngest was telling us about his latest project – creating the set for a new show that depicts four different perspectives of the same event. Makes sense that perspectives colour a lot of what we believe to be true and it would totally influence the memory of a situation.
I’ve been thinking about the whole perspective thing since I started writing this column two years ago. When my memory is unclear about the details of a room’s layout or the relationship between people who I’m writing about, for instance, I simply call my cousin or one of my sisters to run it by them. My cousin is the funniest – I’ll phone and begin my questioning before I even offer any salutations. So it goes: “Hi, Sandy.” “Did we pull that rope in Grandma’s attic to lower a set of wooden stairs to climb up?” “No, it was to switch on the big bare lightbulb high up on the ceiling.” “Oh, right. Okay, bye.” “Bye.”
But there are times when there couldn’t possibly be anyone else who would share a memory – or their perspective of a memory. So I’m left to capture details of the recollection as best I can. Or I question myself about my own perspective – was this MY memory that I’m writing about, or was my experience so intertwined with another person that memory has become interchangeable at times?
Worst of all is when there is disagreement over a memory. Just last summer my sister and I were laughing at a pretty unique situation, where my Grandma (who had the pull rope in her attic) was meeting my cousin’s fiancé in the mid 70s. We both remember the scene vividly: it was at the entrance to our childhood home and our parent said, “I’ve been waiting for just this moment! Mrs. Winter, meet Mr. Spring.” Seriously, we have seasonal last names on both sides of the family.
But she’s convinced it was our Mom who excitedly made the silly introduction, and I vividly recall it being our Dad. I mean, it seems much more like him, given he was the person who made my mom wind down the window when we were passing a hearse that was stalled at the side of the road. Dad called to the two men looking under the hood, “Hey, is your battery dead?”
Mom could be goofy, too, but not in that bada bing bada boom style that Dad was known for. Trouble is, we couldn’t reach an agreement in the summer and there is certainly no way to go back to the original source to resolve it now. Regardless, we’re lucky to have it among many other memories in the happy lexicon of our childhood. That perspective is crystal clear!