Some running and some non-running thoughts

First, the memory story. Have I already written this? I don't think so.

I have a very vivid memory of going with my father to Fayetteville, Arkansas when I was 10 or 11 years old for a Tennessee-Arkansas football game. We were big SEC fans. (I still am, so far as it goes. I'm not much for any of that stuff anymore. But if I watch football I'd still rather watch SEC. Or maybe Big 12 now that I'm a Texan. Basketball, ACC is tops, followed by SEC and Big 12. But none of that matters....)

Anyway, here I am, an 11 year old kid in this electric environment. If you've never been to a big-time SEC football game, you really should go, even if you don't like football. It truly is exciting. The atmosphere is like nothing else. 75,000 or more people talking and laughing and yelling in their bright red (U of A) and orange (UT) clothes, and cheerleaders and players on the field looking trim and fit and fast and the smell of hotdogs and beer and the announcer and the bright sun and the green grass and the TV cameras and all the paraphernalia that goes along with such an event. So I'm sitting there absorbing all this color and sound and movement when I realize that a new sound is starting. It turns out that before each home game, a local Fayetteville radio station would broadcast about a half hour of hogs snorting. You know -- Arkansas Razorbacks. Woooooo pig, Soooiee (or however it's spelled -- I can't remember). All the Arkansas fans in the stadium -- probably about 60,000 of them -- tuned their transistor radios to this radio station at full volume.

All those radios tuned in and turned up. An unimaginable din of hogs. And 60,000 people standing and shouting and Wooooooo Pig, Sooieing. The entire stadium was rocking with the noise. And then the team comes back out on the field from their brief pre-game retreat for final preparation and pep talk and the stadium becomes, for 90 seconds, Fayetteville, Krakatoa.

All in all, an indelible, unforgettable experience. I can still see, hear and smell it almost as vividly as when I was sitting right there in the middle of it. Except for one thing....

Apparently it never happened.

I must have told that story a hundred times over the years. A few months ago I was telling it to a customer at REI. He sounded doubtful. He'd been a season ticket holder for decades, he said, and he didn't remember anything like that. I've asked several people since then, including my father, and no one else seems to remember it, either. I've gone to hogwild.com to look up Arkansas football traditions, and there's no mention of it. I seem to be alone with my unforgettable memory.

So, what's up? Perhaps it really did happen that one time, but because it was just a one-off event, most people have forgotten about it. Perhaps they did do it regularly in the past, but by the time I was at that game and the man at REI was a ticket-holder it was already just a memory, and I heard someone talk about it and just thought it happened. Perhaps I long ago thought how cool it would be for them to do that, and over time I turned that into a memory of their having done it.

I don't know. It's a mystery.

One level of its significance to me, as a very amateur student of fringe beliefs and conspiracy theories, is how unreliable memories can be. When someone is talking about their memories of the JFK assassination, for example, many believers love to say "Why would they lie?" While there are many reasons why they might lie, they need not even be lying. They may honestly believe what they remember actually happened. But their honest belief has no bearing whatsoever on the likelihood of the event's reality. The only use memory has is to provide ideas for investigation. No memory can be reliable evidence in such a case.

Well, it's late, and I haven't talked about my 5K last Saturday (I did great, but it created some inner conflict) or my experience during my run today, or my growing desire to run in the Texas Independence Relay or a number of other items. I'll have to do all that....

Later....