If Memory Serves

And far too often, it doesn't

I had a memory from childhood of walking through a half-demolished house — no roof, walls laid bare down to the stone, and an old, broken piano sitting there, exposed to the elements.

It was a strange, disjointed memory. I couldn’t place it in time, only that I must have been very young. In the memory, my stepdad was with me, showing me these houses in a destroyed neighborhood. But where? I couldn’t place the location, either.

I assumed it was somewhere in Belle Glade, Florida, where I grew up. But I couldn’t remember any place there that was a whole neighborhood of abandoned homes, open to the weather, slowly falling apart.

Then last night, scrolling through Amazon Prime, I stopped on one of those old C-grade science-fiction movies — this one from 1960, three years before I was born. It was called Beyond the Time Barrier. The acting was, well, the actors at least memorized their lines. It was shot in about two weeks. The story followed an Air Force test pilot who travels sixty-five years into the future — making it 2024, man, what a year that was — and wanders through the ruins of his former air base.

And there it was.

The remains of standing walls. A roofless structure. A broken piano, looking like it had been left outside for years.

My memory.

Beyond the Time Barrier, 1960

So that memory wasn’t of a real place at all. I must have seen that movie when I was very young, and that single image stayed with me. Over time, it lost its origin and slowly morphed into a “memory” of being inside an abandoned house with my stepdad.

Memories can lie.

I had another childhood memory like that, but this one was far more disturbing. I was in a dark room. A bright light was shining directly into my face. I was screaming and being held down on a table by several people. My dad was there, the light reflecting off his glasses so I couldn’t see his eyes. An old man was yelling. I was being pressed down, squeezed, tortured.

I could never make sense of that memory, either. (Some friends tried to convince me it was an alien-abduction memory, but don’t get me started on that nonsense.) Eventually, I concluded it must have been a nightmare I’d had as a child — one that stuck with me so vividly that my mind later convinced me it had actually happened.

Fast forward to my last visit with my dad in 2022. I didn’t know it then, but he only had a few months left to live. During that visit, he started sharing stories about me with my wife. He told her about the time, when I was very small, that I was playing in the living room, tripped, and hit the sharp corner of an end table. The corner went straight into my eye.

He told her how frantic he was. There was blood everywhere. He thought I’d lost the eye. He rushed me to Dr. Simmons — an old man who had been practicing medicine far longer than he probably should have. Dr. Simmons told him my eye was still there, but I was about to lose it, and he needed to stitch it immediately.

There was no time for anesthesia. The nurse, my dad, and my stepmom had to hold me down. I was screaming. And Dr. Simmons was yelling, “If you don’t hold him still, I might blind him!”

That was it. And the explanation for the scar above my left eye.

A real memory — but stripped of context. I remembered the terror, the light, the yelling, the feeling of being held down. But I didn’t remember how I got there, or why it was happening. Without those anchors, my mind turned it into something else. A nightmare. A torture scene.

That’s what can happen with memory. We don’t store our past as a clean, continuous recording. We store fragments — images, emotions, physical sensations. When the surrounding details of time, place, and cause are lost, the brain does what it always does: it tries to help. It fills in the gaps. It invents context. Not because it wants to deceive us, but because ambiguity is intolerable.

Memory isn’t a witness. It’s a collaborator. Sometimes a helpful one. Sometimes a little too eager to please. Like a good friend with no boundaries. Or like AI, trying its hardest to help you write that term paper — and quietly making things up when it doesn’t have enough information.

There’s one more unsettling thing about memory. When you remember something, you’re not retrieving the original event. You’re remembering the last time you remembered it. Each recall slightly rewrites the memory before storing it again. Over the years, fragments turn into stories, guesses harden into facts, and confidence grows even as accuracy quietly erodes.

When memory really begins to break down — in dementia or Alzheimer’s — the brain doesn’t stop trying to explain the world. It just has less to work with. Time collapses. Context falls away. And the mind does what it has always done: it fills in the gaps, honestly, desperately, using whatever pieces remain. Not because it’s failing to think — but because thinking is what it does.