That time I got stuck in an elevator in the Empire State Building

It was circa-1970-something, I was standing to the left and slightly in front of my grandmother who was petite which is why I thought I was probably older than I was.  I recall my Dad being in the elevator too.  So excited that we were going to the top of the tallest building of it’s time.  And then the lift stopped with a jerk, I could feel my knees buckle a bit.  There was a few moments of panic stricken unspoken fear behind wide eyes.  I can’t tell you how long it was down for, my best guess is only a few moments.  I also can’t say much about the view from the top of the building.  Regardless, I’ve told this story dozens of times in various conversations over the decades … And then there was that time I was stuck in an elevator in the New York City.  Which I did this week at the dinner table when there was a relevant tangent in the conversation. 

But this time, I stopped myself at the beginning of the shaggy dog story and I thought … wait … I can see the picture in my mind’s eye.  And I remember the details of that day as if it was … well, the last time I’ve told this story … but Grandma Pauline never left Belleville.  Okay maybe twice to go to the Jersey Shore.  You see Sandyhook was my childhood scrapbook long before the shooting will forever make it a tearful memorial for the world looking back.  But Grandma didn’t ever go to New York.  Why I hadn’t put those two things together before puzzled me even more.  (And in truth, Dad did take Grandma to my graduation in Pittsburgh, so she definitely left Jersey at least that once.

I talked to Dad on the phone this morning and asked him about my memory.  He couldn’t recall ever being on the Empire State Building either.  But I knew that I had, if not as a young child certainly in High school when the Renaissance Club went to see an off broadway production of Death Trap my junior year.  He suggested I may have dreamt the incident.  But it seemed so vivid.  Dad also suggested that perhaps we went to a “big” department store with Grandma Pauline, and it’s possible we took an elevator then.

During the conversation, we also talked about some other memories of Belleville and who lived on the third floor of the house next to 260 Greylock parkway.  I realized that there was a lot of misplaced people .. great aunts and great grandmothers that had gotten scrambled in my mind.  It brought to mind once again the illusion of our solid reality.

Each of us shape our conditioned egoic mind based not on things that happened as such, but stories of puzzle pieces from people, places and things that may not have held water as much as they reflected back to us our emotional experience at the time.  These chemical fingerprints of memories on our gray matter make up what we make up about life and who we are … who others are in relation to us .. and the overall theme of our persona. 

The collective group of jigsaw templates are held together with neural networks which sometimes get rearranged, but mostly we keep adding new “experiences” to our model that match the matchbox hippocampus diorama of our brain.  Sometimes there are triggers and our  old town roads get shanghaied into Shanghai maglev bullet trains that take us to places in our wayback machine of our misaligned-miasma-memories. Which certainly feel real in the me-moment.

The redneck has an E-Ticket that takes him to Tomorrowland for a small haunted world ride all day extravaganza.  In his dark jamboree it is me-against-the-world and he is alone on a loop of burning in the essence of his being.  He leaves me a thousand times in his mind on his dark days.  And when they are coupled with my hyperadrenergic POTSholes we are on a voyage of sunken submarines.

We each get stuck in our own narrative now and Zen.  Clint Boyer went HAM on rival Ryan Newman after the dash for cash last weekend.  Throwing punches through the open netting of the door at the driver. In the moment, in Boyer’s mind he was convinced that Newman wrecked him.  “Where I come from, you get punched in the nose for that, and that’s what he got.”  Watching the replay footage, it later became clear Newman did not cause the spin out and it’s probably also probable that Boyer is still going to hold a biochemical fingerprint even if his logical brain knows better.  They’ll certainly be watching the two for another dustup next week.

How important are false memories?  How much of our remembered self never quiet sat as we saw it from the iris of our mind?  When I see you right now how much of that is filtered through the misleading memories in my mind?

There is no knowing of course.  The practice has never been about finding answers.  It is as always about questioning … everything.  And knowing that we really can’t know anything for certain.  And when possible .. if we find our self throwing punches in our pineal gland anamnesis we may be able to stop the elevator just long enough to realize the train we are about to board never really gets us where we are going.  Regardless of the past each of us have survived the next step forward depends more upon where we set our sight in front of us than the millions miles we walked to get where we are standing today.