One of my earliest memories is standing by my kindergarten classroom door too embarrassed to join the costume parade outside because I just realized that my homemade kangaroo costume’s pouch means that I’m dressed as a girl.
If there’s anything 5-year-old boys don’t want in 1986, it’s to be considered a girl.
I vividly remember bracing myself in the door frame and resigning myself to the fact that the costume parade must go on while praying that nobody else would make the association.
I mention this story any time kid’s Halloween costumes come up and point to it as one of the earliest examples of how my parents’ divorce adversely impacted my life.
No 1986 father would let his son get on a public school bus dressed as a kangaroo mom. The solution is obvious, you tear off the pouch, give him boxing gloves, and call him a boxing kangaroo.
This week I discovered a news clipping among old family photos that calls my entire memory into question and proves that the costume was so much worse than I remember.
For starters, I always thought Mom made the costume for me with her sewing machine. She did not. It’s entirely made of taped-together paper grocery bags.
Also, I always thought my “baby” was an awesome toy I owned with a long cord attached to a plastic kangaroo that hopped when you squeezed a bulb pump.
But that wasn’t my baby kangaroo; mine looked more like a paper-wrapped sweet potato.
It’s so easy to reflexively protect our versions of the truth even when they’re wrong. If you had asked me a week ago what I wore for Halloween when I was five years old, I would’ve sworn up and down that I was a female kangaroo.
Reality is often stranger than the truth we stitch together inside our heads.
The foundation of my memory was sound. I was on elementary school grounds but I hadn’t yet enrolled in kindergarten.
I was actually in a preschool summer camp held on the elementary school grounds. And though I was dressed as a kangaroo, it wasn’t Halloween. It was Animal Day at camp.
This is a classic example of relying on too much “if, then” thinking. If I was at Towpath Elementary School, I must’ve been a student. If I was so young I can barely remember, it must’ve been kindergarten. If I was in a costume, it must’ve been Halloween.
None of those assumptions are correct.
My childhood memories are like pipe cleaners pasted on popsicle sticks – they don’t hold up that well and you’ve really gotta love me to think they’re something special.
Most of my memories are emotion-based.
Emotions reverberate through time so much more clearly than facts or dates. I have no idea how old I was when I had my beloved pet hamster Squirmy but I’ll never forget the horror of feeling his tumor for the first time or the sadness I felt burying him in our backyard.
I couldn’t tell you which friends were in my second-grade class without looking at a class photo but I can go on in great detail about my childhood friends even though I flowed in and out of closeness with them depending on who was in my class that year, what sport I was playing, or how active I was in Sunday School.
My friends have always been compartmentalized.
When we look to the future we wonder who we’ll become and when we look to the past we wonder who we were.
The lack of definitive memories allows us the freedom to find glimpses in the past of either the person we are now or of the person we still want to become. Memories are like horoscopes, you can pretty much shape them to fit any view of yourself that you choose.
One of my favorite personal artifacts comes from 1991. It’s my 4th-Grade class magazine publishing a favorite poem every kid wrote in class that year.
The cover of the magazine (I’d include a photograph here but it’s packed in a box because I’m moving next week) has one square each student drew to accompany their poem.
My square, in between pictures of happy people, sunny skies, and beautiful fields is simply the handwritten word “WAR” repeated four times. The poem begins, “Saddam Hussein is insane. While people wait, he invades Kuwait.”
I’ve revisited this poem several times in my life and each time found it indicative of a different part of my personality.
As a young man waving the flag after 9/11, the poem proved that I long stood against tyranny. As a comedian, it proved that I mined world events for humor. Now, as a writer, it proves that I intuitively connect on shared experiences.
The far more likely truth is that we got assigned a poem and I complained that I didn’t know what to write about so the teacher said, “pick something from the news.” But I put extra weight behind it now because it’s recorded and preserved.
I look searchingly at my past as a grandmother might examine her newest grandchild for hints of familial resemblances.
I’m not sure if I’m trying to convince myself that my past was a window to who I am now, or that who I am now lives up to who I once was. I just know it pleases me when they line up and I glimpse the continuation of something I recognize as me.
*September 24, 2020, started a 40-day countdown to my 40th birthday. Since I couldn’t travel to Ireland (½ of my ancestral homeland) as originally planned, I’ve committed to reflecting on a year of my life per day for each of the 40 days. Today takes me through Year 10. Daily-ish reflections may be found on my Facebook Page or on the new 40 Years of Wondering page of this website.*
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