A friend posed a question about selective memory. We humans are prone to romanticizing the past to a status of glory. Maybe the bare facts withstood the inflation. Maybe not. 

One time I signed my three year old son up for gymnastics class at the YMCA. It was a free introductory week intended to lure prospective students. The first day he clung to my leg like a barnacle. The second we missed because of a conflict. On Wednesday he let go of me long enough to sit near the mat and watch. By Friday he was brave enough to try a somersault. It was not what I could call a landslide of success. And yet whenever we drove by the gym he would reminisce from the back seat. 

"That's where I took gymnastics class." 

Which of our perspectives is better anyway? Given a choice I will take his. 

One of the ongoing discrepancies in John's and my collective memory is where he proposed. He recalls it as being near the Pennypack, while I think it was at Cairncrest. Kind of a pivotal detail, and yet we both concur on what really matters. He asked and I said yes. 

The pictures on my screensaver are a version of selective memory. They lead me to believe that our family legacy is nothing but trips to the beach, birthday parties, and smiling babies. But I was there. Fights were rampant. Dirty dishes were ubiquitous. Anger was often a thumping drumbeat. 

Except when they weren't. And then I snapped a picture.

One of the downsides of buying into the notion that "everything was perfect" is it feeds into the expectation that today will be too. 

Last Thanksgiving the conversation meandered into the troubled private lives of artists. Musicians who could barely feed their children. Painters with stacks of unsold canvases. You know them: Thoreau. Cassatt. Van Gogh. Austen. Dickinson. Looking over our collective cultural shoulder they comprised the essence of triumph. But it is possible that it felt differently in the moment. 

It's fascinating to me that God did not see fit to edit out those hardships. It was within His power, if omnipotence means what I think it does. But of one thing I can be certain. He asks me to follow and I say yes.