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There are certain things I can recall with piercing perfection. One summer afternoon when I was four, for example, and we were visiting my grandparents; I had wandered unattended from the baking black asphalt of their driveway and was going back when I overshot by a couple of houses. I thought I was returning in triumph – out on my own – but in my absence the scene had shifted. It looked like my grandparents’ house, it was the same color, the same shape, the same driveway. But something was off. There was a clarion kind of anxiety that flooded me, made worse by the appearance of two smiling elderly people who looked like my grandparents but certainly weren’t my grandparents.

They advanced, arms open, wondering aloud whether I was lost and if I needed help getting back. But I couldn’t comprehend it: this was where I was supposed to be. Why didn’t things line up? Had the universe turned in on itself, and now I would have to live my life in an alternaworld populated by strangers – all the while yearning for the family I had forever left behind?

What else could I do, when faced with such a sea change to my little existence? I cried. Cried and cried until my father came and found me.

Other things, too, I remember. The seven times I was humbled in grade school, for various offenses, like responding incorrectly to a question about songbirds (“nocturnal” when it should have been “diurnal”), or for making noise with a paper clapper in fifth grade (my teacher: “Stop it. You’re giving me a migraine.”). I remember the way the hallways smelled of disinfectant when we were shepherded to an assembly room to watch videos of the explosion the day the Challenger was destroyed. I remember eating raisin bran in the kitchen of my parents’ friends’ house, on the February morning when my father came in, all ecstatic, to tell us my sister had been born.

Or at least I think I am meant to remember these things. They are as true to me now as they were back then, but that certainty could come from what psychologists call “flashbulb memories.” They have proved this idea by following a group of subjects for years, asking each person, at set intervals of two, five, or nine years, the details they recalled of some shared iconic event – the assassination of RFK, for example, or the Challenger explosion. I suppose now they will be asking about 9-11. In this manner they are able to demonstrate that the facts of which people are certain tend to shift across the years – to over- or undershoot, as I did with my grandparents’ house.

But, I always wonder, do such shifts really matter? Do they even exist, if they change so completely that the person who has the memories can be convinced, at each refreshed interval, that they are real, lived, personal fact? And what does that say about the nature of our identity, if those handful of things about which we feel we are certain are so invisibly malleable?

Well, I wonder. I wish I could remember the things that have been snatched away from me, that I want returned, with such clarity. Strange how it is. That clarity – it could well be composite, or imagined. Possibly I did not overshoot that house at all. Or I was five and not four, it was spring not summer, my grandmother not my father who found me. Or I was crying about something else altogether: I had skinned my knee.

Are these scientific findings meant to comfort us in our old age, when the neurons cease to light up and reality is really whatever you can grasp – or are they meant to discomfit us in our youth, when things seem so solid and true?

All I know is I was there, I was lost. No one else will remember this except for me. So if it is my own private history, it can be written over an infinite number of times – and I will never have known the difference.

So: did it happen? Or not?

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