We laughed at the New Yorker cartoon showing a man and woman at a restaurant table with one of them asking the other,"Which one of us doesn't like salmon?" We laughed at the New Yorker cartoon with the guy calling across the room at a standup party,"Honey, what do I have my PhD in?"
We have been married for more than 5 decades and have had many adventures and experiences together. It is not surprising that the memories get tangled, modified and sometimes subject to debate. When we had only been married a year or two, we were impecunious. We didn't have anything to use as a stake in poker late one night. We settled on granting the winner of the hand with certification as being correct in 65% of any future disagreements. She won. I have since found that her memory is correct more like 95% of the time but I refuse to admit that.
Besides, it can be boring and frustrating to play Maurice Chevalier to Hermione Gingold all the time. You know the song: he remembers it well but has the color of her dress, the day of the week, the date and other details of the marvelous evening when it all started, wrong. Oh, it is definitely possible that we met in Lutherville and not Towson. That she visited the campus sick bay and not the library. It is not possible that I am always wrong. I have a PhD, for cryin' out loud. I simply refuse to disallow my own memories all time. There have got to be times when she is WRONG! I just don't know quite when they are.
Yesterday, I wrote about doing the dishes and cited the time when I stupidly plunged my hand into the suds and sliced my finger on the razor edge of the Cuisinart food processor cutting wheel.
This morning, I hear her laughing and asked what was funny. She said I had written about cutting my hand but that it was she who had cut her hand, not me. As she said it, I could recall taking her to the emergency room while being annoyed with a smart woman who would plunge her hand onto a very sharp piece of metal. So, it was indeed her blood in the soapy water and she is totally right, again. She promises not to do that again and not to be right so much.
