My friend Marty Stahursky was a popular Freeport HS basketball star, some years ahead of my time there. My father was a teacher at FHS, so I had heard about him years before I actually met him. I used to tell a story about seeing his name on papers that my father was grading. There was one problem: Marty never had my dad as a teacher. I learned this after getting to know Marty in the '80's. Here's the most embarassing part: I continued telling this story, on occasion. It only happened a few times, inevitably in a bar, after a few too many adult beverages. Marty is a bartender, and I probably had a few too many the first time he "set me straight" about the story, as well. Still, as recently as 2002, I told this story right in front of him, and got publicly embarassed for it. Everyone laughed, as I tried to play it off as an example of a "false memory," which I had believed for so long, it was hard to distinguish from the truth. This only made my friends laugh harder. I haven't seen Marty since then, though there are no hard feelings, other than my embarassment.
While I realize that my "Marty" story pretty much happened in bars, I got to thinking about it recently because of Hillary's "Tuzla" flap. Maybe it's just because I can identify with her embarassment, but I've decided to "give her a pass" from criticism on Tuzla. I'll let others speculate on how a person creates a story in their mind, and it becomes "true" to them. Me, I've been there.
Now, I just hope Hillary's not having too many "adult beverages."
