That's not exactly how it happened.

I have an utterly false memory of a particular incident in my life. I was running the tale past a blogger friend the other day, and as I told her about it -- knowing it was false -- it all came back to me as vividly as if the incident happened yesterday. It is a memory I have had for years.

I thought about that in light of some recent studies I was reading about, in which it has come to light that our memories play profound tricks on us, and some things we remember as being unremittingly bad, were not quite as bad as we thought. At least not all the time. Likewise, good memories were probably of time sand incidents that did contain negative moments or situations. In other words, things aren't always as they seem, at least in retrospect.

How do you remember your childhood? Is it a warm and fuzzy recollection of just one swell time after an another, and a mom and dad who constantly doted on you and your siblings? That just may not be exactly what it was like. There were bad times, and there were frightening times, and times when you hated your parents and siblings. Likewise, if you had a bad childhood, filled with say alcoholism and abuse, were there not also good things? A teacher who perhaps really cared about your wellbeing? Friends who were able to take you away from the ickiness of your home? Probably. I am always amazed by pictures of children in war zones who will merrily carry out their childish games amidst the rubble.

Anyway, the false memory I told my friend about. My stepdaughter and I are leaning over the railing of a little highway bridge in the town of Kapaa on Kauai, in the Hawaiian islands. She was about 14 at the time. Her mother is getting her hair done at a salon in a shopping mall just down the road from where Andrea and I are lingering. We were bored, so we went for a walk to kill time. We were laughing about how her mother, vacation or not, still had to have her hair 'just-so', but we knew she would also complain about what the stylist did, and how it just wasn't as good as the work from her stylist back home. We were idly looking down into the water and watching the little fish swimming about. It was kind of fun. A warm and comforting memory. A couple of years ago I was walking across that little bridge, and my thoughts went immediately to Andrea and our lovely time there.

And then it came to me. There was something that did not compute with that blissful memory. I had never, ever been on Kauai with Andrea. I had been there with her mother, and her mother once did get her hair styled in the salon of my recall. I even walked up to that little bridge. But Andrea was not there! My memory bank, my false memory bank, inserted her. I was once on Maui with her, but never on Kauai. After our divorce, I missed Andrea painfully. I still miss her very much. So, a trick was played, and she was inserted into a scene that she was never a part of. And there she rests, because I can still bring the incident back without difficulty.

What this means is, if our memories are so false -- and my story is no different from the stories of others about this -- is that they should not be relied on. Police and prosecutors know this. They know that eye-witness accounts of crimes should always be carefully scrutinized, because memories just do damn well play tricks.

At a potentially more damaging level, there are those tales of horrific sex abuse by a parent or elder that will come up in court cases, only to have it discovered that the incidents never actually happened. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. There are countless real incidents of such abuse. But, not all of them stand up in the light of serious scrutiny. The memories of the young are especially suspect, and even moreso when these people are coached by adults with a vested-interest in having a certain end result come to pass. That's why the kids in the Michael Jackson trial were so seriously and heavily scrutinized. Jackson, as we know, was ultimately acquitted. Was he innocent? We'll never know but, unfortunately, the memories of a number of material witnesses were remarkably inconsistent.

So maybe, if you are left with bitterness about a divorce or separation, for example, you should check back in your memory bank more scrupulously and you might find that all of the bad things were definitely interspersed with some good ones, or you wouldn't have been there in the first place.