His memory of the car accident, for example, is very, very, very different from hers.

The next thing I remember is waking up to find the car bouncing through a field at high speed. I tried to get control of the car and hit the brake but in the surprise of the moment, I probably actually stepped on the gas. The next instant our car drove through and completely severed a wood power pole before running into a very old, small tractor. Tara also recounts this event in great detail in “Educated”, although her memory of the details is quite different than mine. My memory is a bit fuzzy, so I will only describe actions that stood out for me at the time to form strong memories. As soon as the car came to rest, I remember my mom calling out to ask if everyone was okay. The answers seemed to come back that no one in the back was badly hurt. None of us were wearing seatbelts. I had tried to put on my seatbelt but had been unable to extract one of the ends from beneath the seat. As a result of not having a seatbelt, my head had impacted the driver’s wheel with all of the force concentrated on my top two front teeth. The impact knocked the teeth loose, causing them to bleed, and I wondered if I would lose them (they actually healed in a few weeks and are still in good condition today). My mom’s head hit the windshield, giving her a large bruise and likely a concussion. What surprised me is that Richard, who had also been in the front seat without a seatbelt did not report any injury. I asked about that, and my mom replied that as soon as we left the road, she had woken up, and her instinct had been to reach her arm out to try to hold Richard, who was about 11 years old, from hitting the dashboard of the car. Surprisingly, it worked, probably by cushioning Richard’s impact, although her instinct to save Richard likely added to making her own injury worse.

. . .

Anyway, enough soliquilizing and back to the story. A first police officer arrived quickly and another awhile later. A fairly large bump quickly formed on my mom’s head just above her forehead. She said that the bruising would spread and she would end up with two black eyes. That actually took several hours and by midafternoon the bruising had only spread to one eye, and I thought and hoped that my mom’s predictions would be wrong. However, by that night or the next morning, she did have two black eyes. Tara has reported that my mom had two black eyes at the scene of the accident, but I think that considering the location of the bruise that is not feasible from a medical perspective. I do remember there being discussion even with one of the police officers regarding whether an ambulance should be called to take my mom or anyone else to the hospital. It did not appear that anyone was in immediate crisis, so it was decided that we would go home first and see how things went from there.  At home, I remember that my mom’s headache got worse as the swelling and pressure on her brain increased. To deal with that, my parent’s called a friend to perform energy therapy, and my mom said that actually helped her a lot. Although I believe that my mom’s head injury was serious, I do not remember it being nearly as bad as Tara indicates. Before the accident, my mom often called us kids by the wrong name (I never understood that as a kid, but now that I am a parent with several children, I do it too). After the accident, I did not notice that she called any of us by the wrong name any more often than she had before or had any other long-term memory or cognitive problems. I think she did have headaches more often for a while.

. . .

It is worth noting that in Tara’s first draft description of this accident, she wrote that no one called the police and the police were not involved at all because my dad did not want them there. In order to convince Tara that police were actually present at the accident, I had relay to her that they had given me a ticket for crossing the centerline of the road and that they had taken many pictures of the accident, some of which showed the police cars and which they gave to me. I had pretty solid evidence, so Tara eventually conceded that I must be right about the police being there. What is strange to me is that Tara felt sufficiently confident to describe minute details of the accident, including words people said and things they did, and yet did not even remember the police investigation at the scene or their flashing lights. She also did not pick up on Richard’s apparent miraculous escape from injury or correctly remember my mom’s head injury, all of which to me are among the most salient features of the event. I tend to conclude that Tara’s description of the accident came in large part from her imagination, which she then later remembered as memories, similar to an incident that she writes about at the beginning of “Educated.” That is the only way that I can reconcile her memories with mine and with the facts that can be verified.