Memory is a funny thing. Sometimes I remember things not as they happened, but as I perceived them. My emotions fill in a color and texture to the memories that make the memories not completely accurate.
Take the Black Angus restaurant, for instance. It's your run of the mill steak house complete with coupons in the Sunday paper. Yet, when I remember going there with my parents as a child, I remember it as one the fanciest restaurants imaginable- the cloth napkins, the huge steaks and all the rich people eating there. I remember thinking that I had to be on my best behavior, and, yet, being not quite successful in eating neatly! Logic tells me that the biggest steak was 6 ounces and that no one rich is likely to go there, but I still think of Black Angus with all the excitement of the seven year boy who was going to eat a steak the size of my plate.
Even today, when I take friends out for special occasions, I find myself drifting more often than not to the Black Angus.
"Forget Ruth Chris. I know a great steak place," I'll say...
The same principle probably applies to my "career" as a fighter and a boxer. One of my more vivid (and faulty memories) is that of me fighting a gang of East L.A. gang members when I was a freshman in college. I was visiting a friend in LA, when I had an altercation with her ex-boyfriend. In response to being told that I was a member of the UC Berkeley boxing club team, the ex-boyfriend and two tattoed friends decided to show me how gang initiations took place. No, the initiations did not involve milk and cookies and a secret password. Instead, they jumped me in the park and tried to beat me like a drum. It was me against the three of them, but I managed to break the ex-boyfriend's nose and his friends backed away, scared, no doubt by my prowess.
The reality was pretty different than my perception. The guys weren't gang members- just a group of relatively short and out of shape guys. And I was 6'2" and in my absolute prime. I was in the boxing club in the University, lived in the weight room and didn't have to watch my diet for another decade. So, nineteen year old me against the East LA dwarfs? Not a problem. Forty year old me against three people of any size or age? Let me get my Smith and Wesson..
It makes me wonder what things from today will become "legendary" feats by the time I'm older and remembering those glory days. No doubt it'll be some court exploit that in the retelling became a battle before the supreme court.
"They handled divorce cases in the Supreme Court?" I can hear someone in the future asking.
"Damn right, they did. Now those were the days...."
