Mia Farrow and the Summer of 1959

I'll never forget the summer of 1959. My mother rented a tiny cottage for us close to Lake George where she'd spent summers herself as a child. I remember the strange scrub sand beach surrounded by stunted trees – it was very different from the sandy beaches of Coney Island. I remember, we went to a homey cafe and ate strawberry rhubarb pie. I remember, she taught me how to swim --

Here's where the memory becomes odd because actually, I can't swim --

There are other problems with these memories, too. The events never happened.

I know this because I verified them as an adult. I spent the summer of 1959 as a foundling at a very depressing fresh air camp in Vermont called Daffodil Farms. The son of the camp's owner was in his teens and frequently displayed his penis to me, inviting me to touch it. I have no idea whether I did or not.

These memories are kind of superimposed on my memories of Lake George.

Well, perhaps you got the year wrong. Perhaps the Lake George vacation happened in another year.

But, no – my mother was quite explicit. She would fly into rages, beat me with wire hangers, and afterwards, remorseful in exactly the same way that men who beat their wives are said to be remorseful – Why do you make me do this to you? Why do you make me so angry? -- she would begin rhapsodizing about the wonderful vacation she took me to at Lake George when I was seven. In 1959.

I suppose it's possible the vacation actually happened and she got the dates wrong.

Except that I remember other things that I'm pretty sure never happened too.

And then after she died, when I was going through her stuff, I ran across a 20 page thing she'd written at the height of the nervous breakdown she had when I was 12. The thing was a description of a cross country bus ride we'd taken from New York City to San Francisco. The high point of our trip was a sunrise we watched together over the desert just outside Las Vegas. How beautiful it was to watch the blackness shimmer into pink and gold and purple! I believe we held hands as we beheld the glory of God's sunrise together.

Except this, of course, definitely never happened. When my mother had her breakdown, I was sent to live with Annie and Rik.

I'm not sure to what extent my mother believed the stories she told me. Maybe she came to believe them. Or maybe she believed they embodied a kind of super-reality that superseded everyday, ordinary reality. Reality the way it ought to have been because that's the way she imagined it being.

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Anyway, I'm sure this is why the whole Woody Allen/Mia Farrow brouhaha – the actual facts of about which I care nothing – has been such a tar baby for me.

I know perfectly well that it's possible to implant memories in a kid's mind. Imaginative children are very porous.

Allen's behavior with Soon-Yi was inappropriate to say the least, and displayed either a buffoonish ignorance of boundaries or a kind of narcissistic entitlement that he should be able to have what he wanted just because he wanted it.

But Farrow is the real viper here as far as I'm concerned. I don't believe for one second that Allen molested Dylan. I think Dylan believes she was molested. I think Farrow manipulated Dylan into believing Dylan was molested.

My narcissistic, histrionic mother implanted memories into my head when I was a child and now those traumas are transferred on to this current event.

Connecting those dots is liberating but the process still makes me sad: Poor little seven-year-old me!

Fortunately, I have a lot of distractions planned for the weekend.