From CONFESSIONS OF A SELF-CERTIFIED LIFE COACH.

Lesson 20: Cognitive Dissonance is on the Clock, 24-7.

Perhaps something like what I describe below has happened to you.  When you reach a certain age, you have SO many memories, some of which are real, some of which are memories of photos of real events, and some of which are really the shakiest of all memories: recollections.  Some memories are explicit, some implicit and some procedural, and then there’s the oddball conflated memory.  There are also repressed memories (see Freud, whose legitimacy has been on a lifelong – in MY life, that is – decline), and engrams (according to Scientology, changes in mind-state due to memories, and sometimes traumatic ones – see charlatans, and in particular, L. Ron Hubbard), but neither repressed memories nor engrams are what I’m writing about. I’m writing about recollections.

Steven Wright: “Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.”

The Set-up, or Ah, Childhood!

I recall a certain book from my childhood, a book published as part of the Little Golden Book series – a series which in itself dates back to 1942 – about a young boy learning to play ball, aptly called Play Ball.

I recall that this particular book was read to me so often that I learned to read the book before I actually learned to read, and by this I mean associating certain words with pictures on certain pages and in an order that enabled me to recite the words on pages even before I was able to decode the written words.  Reading, or being read to, memorizing, and parroting.  That was me.  At age 4.  In roughly 1955.  Soon thereafter, according to memory, the last word on each page became associated with my internal time-to-turn-the-page marker, and from there, individual words became associated with specific markings on each page, many of which were repeated, and I was off to the reading races.  Thank you, Mom.

The last time I was in Baltimore (in July, 2017) I served as a Manny for my granddaughter, Rosabelle, while Mom Kate and Dad Brian had to work.  I told Kate and Brian about my memory about this book while I was reading to Rosabelle, who at the time was 4+ months old.  Since I frequently tell long and pointless stories to family members, at the time I received little more than simple acknowledgment that this was the way that I remembered learning to read.  Rosabelle couldn’t care less, but then again, she was 4+ months old and was fascinated with ARE YOU MY MOTHER.

Later the same month I get the following photos.

Left to right, there’s Brian reading the Little Golden Book, PLAY BALL to Rosabelle, there’s the cover of PLAY BALL, and on the signature page, there’s my Mom’s all-caps handwriting of my name Mark L. Rosenblatt.  That’s the book!  PLAY BALL!  And that’s the copy of the book I read as a child because that’s my Mom’s handwriting!

I called Kate to ask about the book because I neither recalled keeping it OR passing it along to Kate.  Kate pointed to the signature page and asked, isn’t that Grandma’s handwriting?  “Yes, it is,” I responded.  I had found an old friend.  Not a copy of an old friend, but a real old friend.

Three things here.  One is that it the printing of my name WAS my mother’s printing.  Two is that my Mom’s name was Rosabelle.  Three is that my granddaughter is named after her great-Grandma!  Rosabelle Marion Smith, a/k/a Baby RB, meet Rosabelle Teitler, a/k/a Mom (to me), Grandma (to Kate) and Great-Grandma (to RB).

Before Rosabelle – that’s baby RB to you – was born, I would joke with friends and family that I couldn’t imagine holding an infant granddaughter and calling her by my Mom’s name.  My brothers and I never called Mom Rosabelle, unless of course we mimicked our Dad calling his wife.  “Rosabelle, the cole slaw at Waldbaum’s is NOT bad!”  I imagined tears coming to my eyes while I looked at my new granddaughter, thinking Rosabelle.  My Mom’s long gone.  As I like to say, “Mom moved to New Jersey in early 1993.”

So for a while before birth I planned to call my granddaughter Mom.  And when she got older, I’d first try out RB, and then when she got still older, Rosabelle.

The Hard Facts

Armed with photographic evidence and recalling from my Mass Media days that publishing in the U.S. took a great leap forward following WWII as a subset of consumerism and a by-product of an expanding middle class, I checked online about the Little Golden Book series.  Little Golden Books was started up in 1942 by three publishers, one of which was Simon & Schuster, still in existence, and is currently a Random House imprint, and Random House is owned the German media company Bertelsmann and the British publisher, Pearson.  One of the original twelve releases published as part of the first run of Little Golden Books, THE POKY LITTLE PUPPY (see below), has sold more than fifteen million copies and is the single biggest-selling children’s hard-cover book.  Ever.  It’s still in print, only now it’s a Little Golden Classic.

Then I looked up PLAY BALL.  Known as Book 325 within the hallowed halls of Little Golden Book University (PLAY BALL was the three-hundred twenty-fifth book published in the little Golden Book series), it was first published in hardcover in 1958.

But wait.  I was seven in 1958!  Not four.  I then experienced a full-blown real-time case of cognitive dissonance!  My mind raced around trying to pull apart how I got to this point.  Do I remember reading this book in Brooklyn before my parents moved the family to Long Island in 1959?  Yes.  So my Mom probably got me this book in late 1958.  And you can’t argue with facts … Earth to Trump supporters, listen up here … so this CAN’T be the book I remember learning to read by.  And then a memory of my middle brother, Len, hit me, telling me that I was not too smart as a kid AND that I was adopted.  And I can’t ask Len.  He too moved to New Jersey more than a decade ago.  No, that’s not a memory.  That’s just a distraction.  Maybe I didn’t learn to read until I was seven!  Maybe my parents kept me out of elementary school because they thought I “wasn’t mature enough.”  Maybe that’s why we moved in early 1959 and I found myself in second grade in Hicksville, in Nassau County on Long Island.  NYC authorities were cracking down on parents who kept their children from school because they weren’t sufficiently mature, and my parents fled with me to Nassau County!

But that’s preposterous.

The Tunnel at The End of the Light

Say what you want about cognitive dissonance, and I don’t want to get too Deepak Chopra here, but cognitive dissonance makes you think.  Scratch that.  Makes you think if you CAN think or WANT TO think — again, Trump supporters, pay attention here.

The dissonance created by believing A (I learned to read by reading PLAY BALL) while confronted with B (the fact that PLAY BALL wasn’t published until well after I learned to read) shook out a secondary memory fragment.  And the fragment goes like this.  Sometime after I got married in 1975 and perhaps no later than sometime shortly after daughter Kate was born (in 1979), I saw PLAY BALL in a bookstore, recalled the book as THE book that I learned to read from, thereby pouring memory cement over a bad memory, locking the bad memory in place for another 35+ years.  Damn!  Then I vaguely recall showing the book to my Mom to get her reaction, and then asking that she print my name on the signature page to have a real print connection between my Mom and me.

But I will never know.  No one’s around who can tell me for certain.  Sometimes I feel that there’s no one around who can tell me anything for certain, and while I’ve got sufficient research skills and knowledgeable friends and family members who can cover everything up to 1. the frontiers of science, 2. whether my ancestors were hunter-gatherers, farmers, or sun-worshipers (or all three), and 3. the etymology of words like lozenge, I now realize I have to reconsider everything I know.

Well, not everything, because that would take an awfully long time.

The next time I head down to Maryland to see Kate, Brian, and of course, Baby RB, who will be roughly five and one-half months old.  Know what I’m going to do when I’m with her?

Read.