What does it mean when someone is asked to prove themselves as credible by recalling a date?

It is not always obvious when people will remember dates. Sometimes — and for some people — a date is seared into memory by events. Or there’s a date that you choose to remember, in order to commemorate, or celebrate, or simply take note of, when it comes around again. One might think that having a crime committed against you would mean that you carefully note down all the particulars … but when the crime is one that you would rather forget, or when you’re not sure anyone considers it a crime … maybe you don’t write it down.

I keep being reminded of hearing Ronald Reagan on the radio, saying, in response to a question about having a particular conversation on a particular day, “No, I don’t remember. Who remembers what they were doing on August 9, 1985?!”*

And I remember being outraged, because (1) remembering the exact date didn’t seem nearly as important as whether the conversation had happened at all, so it seemed he was using a loophole to avoid answering, and (2) what kind of question was that — after all, I remembered what I had been doing on August 9, 1985.

I felt extremely self-righteous about this, because his implication was that no one would remember a date, when I found it a point of pride that I remembered All the Dates. I didn’t have a photographic memory; it was much more type-focused than that: names, lists, the position of a word on a page, dates. Not years — it would be a long time before I really got a good sense of history in my head — but dates from year to year. I kept a diary, and I referred to it, and I remembered … not actually all the dates, but many, many significant dates. I remembered when my concerts and plays had been, and when I saw Cats (December 29, 1984), and when I’d been hurt, and when I’d had awkward conversations, and when I’d had amazing conversations. I’d sometimes refer to certain events by the dates when they happened, when writing about them later. “That October 17, 1987, conversation.” Or “September 22nd skies,” which is still a description I use, because it happened two years in a row on the same day**.

I also knew many many many people’s birthdays.

Point One of this post is that I was surrounded by people who were not like this. Most people around me did not measure their lives in calendars and dates. They were amazed that I might remember the date of their party last year, or when we had some conversation, or that I knew their birthday.

Point Two is that, for the most part, even I no longer remember those dates. I remember when I saw Cats, but I no longer remember what conversation happened on October 17 in high school. I still know a lot of birthdays***, and I remember vividly some of the events and conversations from adolescence, including traumatic ones. But my memory — my lovely, unusual memory — of dates in the eighties is no longer something I can rely on.

So when people ask someone to produce exact dates from 30-40 years ago as a way to determine whether an event happened at all, my single data point says to me that most people can do this only tenuously at best, and that instead of a true connection what they are providing here is only an arbitrary test, and a ploy for the influence of public opinion.

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*I’m not actually sure when this was. My attempts to verify it online have led me to this 1992 deposition about the Iran-Contra scandal, in which
1) I don’t actually see this exchange about August 9, 1985 (or any other date), and from my own memory-context I suspect it was different, earlier testimony that I heard (maybe 1986 or 1990) — or perhaps my memory is faulty;
2) I’m stunned at how many questions they kept asking while he told them he didn’t remember — this deposition was two years before he told the public that he had Alzheimer’s disease;
3) And finally, that in this deposition it’s very, very clear that the dates don’t matter; he simply doesn’t remember the conversations at all. Which throws a rather different light on my reactions to his out-of-context defensiveness.

**It’s a patchy, cloudy sky at night: a surprisingly vivid weaving that covers the whole sky, with deep blue in all the patches. And maybe some moonlight beyond, or stars, going in and out.

***I get frustrated with Facebook, sometimes, for telling me birthdays I would otherwise surprise people by knowing. Other times, however, I realise I would have forgotten and I’m grateful for the reminders. Tricky balance.