My best and oldest friend emailed me to ask if I was sure about Mrs. Slaughter in the third grade (she was there with me, 43 years ago, and also left-handed). Until she asked, I was sure about the broad outlines of the story, but suddenly I wasn't so sure anymore. Mary Anne knew it was Miss Slaughter, not Mrs. (In those days, when mastodons walked the earth, no one was Ms. anything.)
So I called my mother. Who says she doesn't remember whether Miss Slaughter actually tied my hand or just asked her if it was OK. It wasn't, but my first grade teacher, she said, had definitely tied me to my desk. These days a child like me would be medicated, and I'll trust Katey that it might have been a good thing.
There's another disputed memory in my childhood. My mother and I both agree that these events occurred: someone got up late at night, poured a glass of milk, spilled it, got a rag and wiped up the mess, put the rag in the fridge and threw the glass bottle of milk (remember the mastodons?) across the kitchen to the sink. She thinks she did it. I think I did it, and the memory is vivid, including yelling for help because I didn't have shoes on and there was broken glass on the floor.
I wouldn't have gone on about this—I probably wouldn't have mentioned it—except that today I read this piece by Frederick Crews at the New York Review of Books, reviewing two books on the recovered memory madness that swept this country from the late 80s into the 90s.
I was one of the victims of that madness, and it made me furious that anyone (not Crews!) was still defending that crap. My wife of 12 years, suffering from the effects of drugs given to treat a pituitary tumor and from the tumor itself, sought help from Susan Roth, a psychologist at Duke, who convinced her that she had been raised in a Satanic cult and had killed her own children, among others. Roth convinced her that both my wife's mother and I were molesting my 6 year old daughter.
There followed 6 months of videotaped interviews, supervised visits, anatomically correct dolls, and sheer terror. It was the time of the McMartin pre-school trials. People were going to jail for things they could not possibly have done. Eventually various agencies decided there was no evidence that any abuse had occurred, and my wife's complaint was dismissed with prejudice. But she got custody, and when I lost my job (think my job performance suffered?) and had no resources left, financial or emotional, she disappeared. I haven't seen my daughter for 11 years, though a couple of years ago she contacted me and we had a brief correspondence before she cut it off.
I have no idea if this poem, about 3 years old, is any good:
Old Songs
When I got home my wife was gone, and so
I bought a mandolin—eight more strings
To tie me to a world I didn't know,
In which my daughter's fenced from me by rings
Of law and fear. Almost the only things
Her mother let us share before the end
Were meals and music. Maybe she still sings
"I'll Meet You in the Morning" with a friend,
And thinks of me, and remembers how we'd spend
Those Wednesday afternoons with jugband songs,
Bluegrass, and Scottish airs. I could depend
On her to get them right when I was wrong—
Her ear was better. She was eight years old.
What songs we sang when she was mine to hold!
8:11:38 PM 
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