Whose Narrative

A old friend's mother died this week so the wife and I went to the visitation to pay our respects. It's odd what is and what isn't remembered by two people who lived the same event. Phil and I hadn't been close in decades. I had my professional engineering career and family, he was a UAW member/musician without children. I had to grow up and be an adult while he was a perpetual teenager.

As we chatted about the "good old days" Phil brought up three events from our teenage days that I had forgotten completely about. All three events were mundane adolescent behavior at it's worst. Nothing particularly memorable, certainly not life defining in any way. Why did he remember and I forgot? Why did these events seem important to him and apparently useless to me?

He had me at the center of all these events while the truth was, I was just along for the ride. In hindsight, I was mildly embarrassed to even be associated with the events. I wouldn't want any of these events to be used to define my life. I commented afterwards that mindless youth does a lot of stupid stuff. That's all i could manage.

History is the narrative of those who take the time to sit down and record events. If Phil wrote the narrative of our life, I would seem the fool. I wonder just how much of this passes as the history that I study and cite? I've always been a skeptical student. This real life case of altered history gives me even more reasons to have a moment of pause.