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Note | Dec 21 2001

Note left in cream chese

The above note is the note that my friend Mickle left for his fiancée Jean in a drunken, panic-struck moment twelve years ago, as I related in an earlier piece which you should now read or otherwise you won’t understand what follows.

Among other things, the note demonstrates how lame my memory is, for I claimed in that earlier piece that Mickle invited Jean to see a play he had written—a claim which as you can see is false: he invited her to have coffee. All I can offer in my defense is that I was thrown off by the fact that Jean neither called Mickle nor had coffee with him but rather appeared months later at a play he had written and sat in the audience with a girlfriend (no boyfriend; hooray!), where Mickle spied her through a crack in the curtain.

Additionally, I was wrong to say that Mickle inverted his name with Jean’s, for Jean’s name, as you will note, is nowhere on the note. This said, the note does give the appearance of being addressed to Mickle, beginning, as it does, with the word MICKLE, capitalized and underlined, so this particular inaccuracy was at least understandable.

The sad truth is that I overheard Mickle tell the entire story the same week I wrote that account, and still managed to get it wrong. Which makes me wonder, as I often do anyway, how wrongly I am remembering things. How wrongly am I remembering things?

It’s probably better I can’t answer that question.