I’ve got a pretty stellar memory.  I’m getting older and things are starting to slip a little– I’ll open Google and forget what I was going to search, more often than not—but for the most part I recall details of conversations and events pretty well, much to the consternation of friends and family who get caught up in a situation of thinking things are one way when I pretty much remember every last detail. It’s never felt much like a curse; sure, at times, remember embarrassing situations with too much accuracy can be hellacious when running them back through my mind, but, I digress.

A few Saturday mornings ago, my dad and I drove through the snowstorm to take his aunt Donna to the airport to fly home.  Visibility was low, roads were pretty rough in general but the car was all wheel drive and didn’t struggle much at all with the journey. My dad commented on how tricky the roads can get in moments like that, and how you can’t control what other people are doing and that makes it especially difficult no matter how well you yourself might be getting around.

I replied “like the time you were taking me to work at the video store and we came over the hill on 68^th street and there were cars and people all over the road and we slid in to the light pole trying to avoid hitting anyone?”

He said “yeah…just ravioli everywhere.”

I remember that accident every time there is a big snow storm and roads are treacherous, because it was pretty traumatic.  We crested the hill, and, even though we weren’t going too fast we did have to crest that hill at a decent clip or we wouldn’t have been able to climb it.  Coming over the top, there were a cars all over the road way that had slid this way and that way and people…people trying to push cars, people trying to walk up the hill…and here we were, coming down the hill on our side of the road and all kinds of obstacles there that shouldn’t have been.  My dad hit the brakes and we went into a slide that ultimately landed us across the shoulder with my side of the car slamming into the utility pole.

The thing I remember most is a woman in the middle of the road who was walking up the hill stopping and screaming when our car hit the pole… and my dad saying “what’s she screaming for…we’re the ones that just wrecked the car.” Mind you, this wasn’t the time of cell phones yet, so, we got to a phone and called a tow truck.  I still went to work.  The car recovered.

But…the part I never remembered…in years and years of flashing back to this incident in times of major snow and crappy road conditions… was “just ravioli everywhere.”

I had heated up some ravioli for lunch and I was going to eat them when I got to work.  They were in a plastic container and they were the true casualty of this accident, because when we hit that utility pole they went flying all over the inside of the car, like some sort of Chef Boyardee crash test gone wrong.  In all the years since, I’d forgotten all about this pretty significant detail, but when I brought the wreck up to my dad it was pretty much the main thing he remembered about the incident.  It’s had me thinking ever since about memory and how it relates to personal experience.

We’re all writing our own script.  It’s not necessarily just snow storms and driving when we find in life how tricky the roads can get; how you can’t control what other people are doing; how especially difficult that can be no matter how well you yourself might be getting around; or, how your struggles in a given situation might have absolutely no impact on anyone else’s journey. So, while we tend to always see things through our own lens, the people in our life might focus on something completely different, and that’s OK, too. Just do you… you can’t control, or even know, what someone else is thinking or doing.  Take away everything you can from every moment, but, remember that we’re all sharing this experience and if you stop a moment and listen you might hear a different tune in someone else’s version of the song.