This story originally aired June 27, 2018.
Food memories are no more reliable than any others. I learned that this week after an email exchange with my sister, Debbie. Deb's been binge listening to Food for Thought and wrote to chat about a recent one in which I mentioned my childhood experience shopping for live chickens with my mother.
She thinks I'm imagining it.
"I'm only four years younger than you and I think would definitely have remembered that." Seems real to me, but even if Deb's right, at least I got a show out of it.
Our email exchange was so much fun that I shared it with Nancy Leson, hoping of course to get another show out of it. That prompted her to get in touch with her own siblings on the same topics. She had completely forgotten the reason why their mother shoo'd them from the kitchen early on Sunday spaghetti nights.
Though we can agree it was all about hotdogs and pinball machines, my sister Carole says the place we loved was Adventurer's Inn in Yonkers. I say it was Cook's on the Boston Post Road. It had a huge neon windmill sign. Great dogs and pastrami inside, and a big room full of pinball and skee-ball machnes in back. Now I can't even find a single reference to the place on the web. Could I have imagined that, too?
One thing "The kids" and I do agree on is what happened the time I attempted to make a pizza from the Chef Boyardee boxed kit. When we pulled it from the oven the best I could manage was "Well, better than nothing."
"Nothing would have been better," sister Carole corrected.
"Memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing." – Memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus
