Personal histories aren't really comprised of events, there's something false and beside the point about standard biographical data. I passed this parked car and just as I walked by a woman and two boys got out, they were maybe 8 and 10. The older boy was in the midst of some sort of tantrum, he was walking in mindless circles by the car in a rage, blind with fury, screaming something about not wanting to go someplace, or something. The younger boy looked bemused, like he was observing an unusual animal at the zoo. The mother figure looked patient and somewhat aloof, with the air of having suffered through such outbursts many times before. As I neared, she pulled the boy to her and stroked his hair a little, letting the fit run its course, and as I walked by she gave me this conspiratorial wink and rolled her eyes as if to say "kids, what're you gonna do?"

I thought, well here we have a single event that will be remembered by and affect the four of us in wildly different ways. I will forget about it completely very soon. The younger brother is perhaps a calmer sort and not given to tantrums, and this maybe will color his attitude toward his older brother for the rest of his life, who knows? For the mother, I was part of the experience, an unwelcome and annoying witness to her family's imperfections. She may have been feeling somewhat defensive, perhaps entertaining the possibility that I, a stranger, was judging her relative lack of warmth and concern, or perhaps was slightly embarrassed that I was witnessing her relatively mature kid acting like a baby. The screaming kid probably didn't even see me, except maybe as a shape surrounded by a fuzzy halo of light, perhaps later he'd feel a crackling shiver of shame.

There's what happens, like a public record of events, and then there's each person's private morass of impressions and associations, emotional reactions, physical sensations, feelings burbling to the surface and becoming disturbances in one's consciousness, and all of this is like a big jumble, and when we tell the story later we smooth it out and apply a facile narrative vector and leave out the parts that don't fit, and that becomes the standard account, to others and even to ourselves. But what's left out is often the stuff that has the biggest impact, ultimately.