Confabulation
For years I believed that as a child I had seen JFK in person, maybe at the airport in the neighborhood where I grew up. I held an image of him passing by, waving to the crowds; an image taken, no doubt, from old news reels and documentary footage. My parents may have contributed to this by relating a story in which JFK was mentioned. Maybe they weren't even talking to me, maybe I just overheard it...Later I found out that John F. Kennedy had been dead for a long time before I was even born (in 1964). I was genuinely confused and astounded, so deep was this false memory. There is also a memory of a real movie which somehow got conflated with the idea of the "pound of flesh" in The Merchant of Venice...in this old film, there was what I thought was a gob of meat or flesh on a scale, and the tortured face of a man in agony who was witness to what was presumably a carnage or atrocity of some kind. I have no idea what this movie was but I am pretty sure it had no...