Memories Are Fluid

I watched a little bit of Sixty Minutes last night. They had a program about memory. The show featured a woman who had been sexually assaulted. During the assault she studied the perpetrator so that he could be convicted when caught. She picked out his photo from a selection of eight photos. She chose him out of a line-up. DNA evidence cleared the man of any wrong doing after he spent 11 years in prison. This woman honestly tried her very best but she was wrong, horribly wrong. According to legal studies, the most common cause of people paying for crimes they did not commit is faulty eye witness accounts. Psychological experiments were run showing how fluid memory can be. The people in the experiment were shown a film clip of a crime and asked to pick out the perpetrator from a line up. Many times the wrong person was chosen. Right after the show ended, I got a call from a former college roommate. We hadn't spoken in years. We connected as if the years hadn't gone by. We reminisced about our apartment on Fifth Avenue in St. Cloud. We had a first floor apartment in an old home that was converted into six apartments. Our apartment had 3 beds in the bedroom, the towel racks in the bathroom, and 3 shelves in the refrigerator. Three people fit in there very cozily. She remembered the Baptist church next door. I had no idea there was a church next door. I thought it was another house. She said no, it was a Baptist church, and didn't I remember how loud they were on Sunday mornings? She said the hymn singing through the open windows was very loud. I cannot remember this at all. You'd think I would because listening to people singing hymns on Sunday morning sounds very quaint. I remembered a grocery store in the other direction. She did too. She said we had a little red wagon and would go shopping together. She'd put her Pepsi in the wagon next to my Tab and we'd pull our groceries home in the wagon. I remember the Pepsi and the Tab but cannot remember the red wagon at all. We both remembered our landlord. He was a frail looking older man who wore a suit and tie when he came by each apartment on the first of the month to collect the rent. We agreed that he was very polite and kind. I think it's strange that after we both lived together in the same place at the same time, our memories differ so much.