Have you ever had a memory of your childhood when you are pretty sure you owned something, but can’t pinpoint any firm grounding in reality that makes the instance for sure, definitely real and concrete? I seem to recall when I was a youngster I owned a little turntable; it was white and had a picture of Michael Jackson on it. This turntable also came with a floppy 45 of “Thriller,” if my memory – which I’ve learned to distrust – serves me right.
So, here I am, trying to remember myself singing into the microphone (yes, I remember there being a microphone in which you could sing along with the record), probably decked out in whitey tighties and a dinosaur t-shirt, singing “Thriller” at the top of my lungs. But it’s not there; that memory isn’t there. It should be, or at least I think it should – I distinctly remember that record player existing, Michael was wearing a yellow suit with a yellow bow tie, and his name was inscribed in that silly ’80s style fake script font you see on garage sale flyers and poorly put-together neighborhood newsletters.
But what if that didn’t happen? What if that record player never existed, or I never owned it? Then what? Do I trust my mother’s picture-perfect memory of my childhood – the one where I am an excelling youngster, bound for glory as I exceed all of the other children my age in a great search for knowledge? Or do I trust my father’s memory, with me being mostly on my own as a kid, the same sort of perfect child, but this time with a few hints of corruption my mother always leaves out? Could either of them remember this little record player? They don’t remember the McDonald’s Transformers toys I had and lost, something that made me nearly cry when I realized it, as I searched the house, the car, everything.
Perhaps this was a dream I had as a kid – I’ll admit, like most kids my age, Michael Jackson was the sort of pop star I was looking for. On top of his pop-sensibility, he also had that movie where he turned into a robot and a video game where you danced to kill bad guys and saved the kids…and turned into a robot. Maybe I loved Michael so much that I wanted to have this record player I saw in a JCPenney catalog. I could have been sitting there, looking through the catalog (like I did around Christmas time every year) and I saw it, and then dreamed I had it. Now, I remember having it, even though it was nothing more than a dream.
So what does that say for dreams? Perhaps dreams can become reality – you just have to wait 15 years for it to happen, and by that point whether or not you owned the thing doesn’t even matter. If you remember some good times, it doesn’t matter if they really happened or not.
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I still have that turntable of Michael Jackson.