“And it’s awfully hard to know what one remembers oneself and what one’s been told to remember. I’m told that at the age of four I was taken to Hampstead Heath Fair by my father,
and greatly indulged in all the coconut shies and things, and when told I must get back for luncheon I rolled on the ground and shouted “You brute, you beast, you hideous ass”;
I was never allowed to forget that as a child but I’ve got no personal memory of it.”
-Evelyn Waugh
My family likes to tell a story about how, at the age of five, I ran away at a funeral. I remember being at the funeral. It was winter and I remember my mother holding me
inside her ghastly ankle length fur coat, which smelled like moth balls and Chanel No. 5. I don't remember running away, but according to my family it happened.
A decade later a girlfriend and I were driving past that same cemetery when she pulled in and ripped up a bunch of daffodils that someone had planted on a grave,
presenting them to me as a romantic gesture. I know I was tipsy at the time, but that memory, I'm certain, is real.
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