There’s a picture at my mother’s house in Waterville that I refuse to look at anymore.
It’s a simple family photo: my brother and I, dressed in our spiffy Sunday suits, standing on either side of our father a year or two before he died.
For many years, I could look upon that picture and see that long-ago me smiling devilishly at the camera and standing to the right of my father.
Let me say that again. In the framed photo on my mother’s coffee table, the young me stood to the right of my father. To the right, I tell you.
And then one day, as I glanced at that picture for perhaps the ten-thousandth time, I discovered that somehow I had managed to move to the left side. I wore the same baby-blue suit and the same impish grin, but somehow, impossibly, I had swapped places with my brother.
Mere confusion, you say? A simple case of memory confabulation?
Perhaps. But I would swear to you all day long — and all night, too — that I used to be on the right side in that photo. I would swear it up and down until you are screaming, I am weeping and we’re both out of beer.
Behold the Mandela Effect, a phenomenon I once feared belonged to me alone, but which I now share with millions.
The name stems from the fact that a great number of people remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s only to hear of his death many years later, in 2013. It’s a situation, in other words, where memory doesn’t jibe with reality.
Let me ask you this. When you think of all those childhood mornings listening to Mr. Rogers sing his goofy song, how do you remember it?
“It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor.”
Right?
Wrong. Go look it up on YouTube and you’ll find that the mincing Mr. R. actually sings it a bit differently, in spite of what millions of us recall.
In the iconic scene from “Forrest Gump,” what is it that the Hanks character says about life in relation to sweet snacks? “Life is like a box of chocolates,” am I right?
Nope. Go look it up.
“Luke, I am your father?”
Vader doesn’t say that. Never did. Not in this reality.
Remember “The Berenstein Bears?” No, you don’t. It’s “The Berenstain Bears” in this dimension.
And boom! Mandela. There are countless examples of this effect, some small and nagging, some huge and unsettling.
Remember, “mirror, mirror on the wall” from Disney’s “Snow White?” Of course you do. But that was a different reality. The evil queen actually says “magic mirror on the wall,” and there is no way you can prove otherwise.
Did they ever find the Lindbergh baby? Did you ever spread Jiffy peanut butter on your toast? What happened to that dude from the tank stand-off in Tiananmen Square? Fruit Loops or Froot Loops? Is your bologna spelled Oscar Meyer or Oscar Mayer?
And most important of all, how the hell did a photographic version of me manage to scoot from one side of my father to the other, and how is it that I’m the only one who noticed?
It’s freaky, I say, and it’s more about the implications than the false memories themselves.
What if I go into work one day and find that the newspaper office is in the center of Kennedy Park rather than next to it? What if my colleagues tell me it’s always been there?
What if people start calling me Craig and then refuse to believe me when I tell them my name is Mark? What if one day there are two suns in the sky and everybody but me thinks this is normal?
It’s unsettling, is all I’m saying. I fear what next will fall into the memory hole only to be spat out, altered in subtle but spine-tingling ways, into a new reality. It’s inexplicable, unverifiable and utterly unnerving.
That and we’re completely out of beer.
Or are we?
Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. Or is he? You can find out by emailing mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.
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