I was eight or so, my mother's parents were visiting for the holidays, and my grandfather—chronologically, a member of the Greatest Generation, but born in the wrong country—had apparently become a regular viewer of the blockbuster 1980s Stephen J. Cannell show.
If you don't know The A-Team—if simply hearing the name of the show doesn't cause you to hear the opening strains of its iconic and unforgettable theme music or picture a smiling George Peppard, cigar clenched between his teeth, chortling that he loves it "when a plan comes together"—it told the story of four ex-Green Berets, court-martialed "for a crime they didn't commit," who had escaped from military prison and begun operating as what you might call pro bono mercenaries.
The team fought crime, stood up for small towns oppressed by corrupt officials or invading biker gangs, rescued kidnapped children, and so on. Despite frequent car crashes and automatic weapons fire being sprayed in all directions, no one ever got hurt, and at the end of each episode the inevitably victorious team always drove off into the sunset—so to speak—in a perhaps unwisely distinctive black conversion van with a red racing stripe, driven by Mr. T, one step ahead of their pursuers, a team of MPs led by the evil Colonel Decker.
In other words, The A-Team was obviously the absolute pinnacle of commercial primetime television programming in the 1980s and possibly of all time. I was a devoted fan throughout the rest of my childhood; the show's catchphrases and more memorable plot lines became integral elements of the pop-culture common currency of the household; and it all started because of my grandfather.
To grasp the specialness of this experience, it may be helpful to understand certain contextual details. The year was 1982, so there were of course no such things as the web, on-demand videos, or digital streaming. We owned just the one television and did not own either a video-game console or a computer. My only other choices for amusing myself at 8 p.m. on a Christmas-break weeknight would have been to read a book or sit and talk with the rest of the grownups, so in other words there basically were no other choices.
It was, in fact, still something of a novelty that we had a television in the house at all. At the time of my grandparents' visit, we were only eight or so months into owning a small black-and-white set, which had been purchased for my mother's comfort while she was pregnant with my little brother. Prior to that purchase, and if you can believe it, we had lived entirely without television ever since the fateful day—when I was two or three years old—that a freak accident killed both our cat and the only television my parents owned at the time.
Watching a show picked by my grandfather would likely also have been good for an exception to the usual rather rigorous TV-watching restrictions enforced by my parents. Ahead of their time in holding strong concerns about the effects of too much of what we now call "screen time," my parents were by that point still limiting me to five hours a week, but they tended not to charge against this budget movies they felt I "should" watch: Chitty Chitty Bang, Around the World in 80 Days, anything starring Humphrey Bogart, etc. A show shared with my grandfather, whom I'd seen face to face perhaps twice in my life so far, would also likely have been considered off-book.
So, I settled down with my grandfather in our basement TV room. I can still remember him drinking a beer from a glass while he watched the show. The glass sat next to the bottle on a small table, and he only filled it a few inches at a time, a signet ring on one finger flashing in the light as he did. Later, I almost always drank my beers straight from the bottle, but on the rare occasions when I poured my beer into a glass I would always think of Opa in general and this particular moment I had shared with him.
As I mentioned, I loved The A-Team throughout my childhood, and that love has always been tied up with the fact that it was my grandfather—German, a World War II veteran, old and foreign and mostly incomprehensible to me—who introduced me to the show in the first place. Given the wide gulf that separated us in so many ways, the fact that we had this odd and oddly specific point of connection was always somehow satisfying.
The problem is that none of this actually happened.
I called my mother's parents Oma and Opa, the German equivalent of something like Grandma and Grandpa. They weren't "Grandma and Grandpa," though, they were "Oma and Opa," migrants from Germany to Canada and then the United States in the years after World War II.
Throughout decades in North America, they never assimilated, never became fluent in or even particularly comfortable speaking English, and never missed a chance to patronize German shops and eat German food. In 1986, the year when—on the occasion of the bicentennial of the opening of Ellis Island—there was official celebration of immigration and the contribution of immigrants to our nation's success and prosperity, they moved back to Germany.
A wide gulf separates most children from their grandparents, but the one between me and my Opa and Oma was especially yawning. There was the language barrier, because I did not grow up speaking German and my grandparents, as mentioned, never spoke English more than absolutely necessary. There was also the fact that both of them had had the unimaginable experience of living through two world wars—that is, they had not merely been alive during the years when those wars were being fought but had actually lived in one of the countries where both were fought.
Especially striking to me at that age was the fact that, during World War II, my grandfather had been an actual German army regular. This was a confusing fact to reconcile with my fledgling sense of World War II as the "good war," a war that the old black-and-white movies (many of which were among those my parents, or more specifically, my father, felt I "should" watch) portrayed as a conflict between good and evil. That is actually a fair portrayal, as far as it goes, except the movies naturally implied that this pure goodness and pure evil were actually embodied, respectively, in each individual American and German soldier, and then there was my grandfather, wearing the wrong uniform.
In a battle, you just keep your head down and shoot over the guys' heads, and then the guy next to you gets shot and suddenly you want to kill everybody on the other side. This, according to my mother, is how Opa had described the experience of combat to her.
My grandfather was a veteran of the Crimea Campaign, in which 30,000 German soldiers ended up dead, wounded, or missing. Fortunately for my grandfather, he was injured early in his deployment—he carried shrapnel in his legs for the rest of his life—and this injury got him sent home from the front to recuperate. He never returned to combat, and my mother was born two or so years after his return.
Opa and I never really talked. I wasn't raised speaking German, and by the time I'd built up reasonably strong conversational German skills through an immersion language program in college, my Opa was slipping into the mental fog of his final years.
On a solo visit to Germany when I was in my late teens, I kept Opa company in the living room while Oma was in the kitchen and listened to a story from the time he'd gone gold prospecting in Alaska. After rescuing an "Indian princess" he'd found being beaten by her father on the bank of a river, he had then been attended and assisted by her in his efforts to establish a gold claim. Don't tell your grandmother, he'd said, glancing significantly toward the kitchen. You see, he had never told my grandmother about this girl at all, much less that he had given her a significant amount of the money he'd earned from his claim when he returned home.
Opa's story was not quite as incredible as it sounds, for—in the 1950s, in the years just after my mother's family landed in Canada—not only had he been a logger and a miner, he had worked in an actual gold mine in the actual Yukon.
But no. When I related this story to my mother, wondering if I had stumbled onto some fantastic family secret, she said Opa had never been to Alaska, much less as a gold prospector. Frankly, she said, it all sounded like it had been lifted straight from one of the pulp western-themed adventure novels that were always his preferred reading.
My growing up years were spent in and around Washington, D.C. When I was born, Oma and Opa lived in Seattle, and then in 1986, as I mentioned, they moved back to Germany. My grandfather died in 1995, my grandmother in 2001. It strikes me now just how infrequently I ever saw them: perhaps a half-dozen visits, for a total of no more than a month's—maybe two months'—worth of days.
The first time I met them was when I was around three years old, in the late 1970s, when—inveterate tourists, in the German way—they took my mother and me on a trip to Hawaii.
The trip is now just a flurry of memory shards in my mind. I remember parrots and a dolphin show and a man who juggled flaming torches on a beach at night, then somehow ate the fire. I remember a woman at this same event wearing a coconut-shell brassiere. I remember thinking that this looked very uncomfortable.
I remember throwing paper airplanes off a balcony with a girl my age. This was during some kind of visit to another family's apartment or hotel in downtown Honolulu, the occasion for which I cannot remember or even really imagine. Family legend has it that, on the street below, there was a motorcade carrying Ferdinand Marcos, then still the president of the Phillipines, and that, as our paper airplanes came fluttering down, bodyguards swiveled mounted machine guns in our direction.
This was very likely the first time I was ever on the balcony of a high-rise building, and I do remember our little white airplanes dwindling to nothing against the dark buildings and the nightime street, far below.
I do not, however, remember the machine guns.
My grandparents' 1982 visit was a sort of stopover after a trip to Germany. The plan was to pass the week of Christmas and New Year's with us before finally heading home to Seattle.
This plan changed, first, after my grandmother severely sprained her ankle when our excitable Airedale, which she was trying to take for a walk, pulled her down the rain-slicked hill in our backyard; not long after, my grandfather suffered a relapse of the malaria that, along with several pieces of shrapnel in his legs, was one of his keepsakes from the Crimean Campaign.
Each of them ended up spending a couple of days in the local hospital, and their departure date was pushed out a week or so.
Opa and The A-Team were on my mind this week because I was going to use this recollection in another essay I'm working on. When I tried to translate the vague and shifting images and feelings of memory into concrete words on a page, however, there was something that seemed off.
The first sign of trouble came when I looked closer at my recollection that this experience had been my introduction to the The A-Team, that I had not even heard of this show until Opa tuned it in. This element had always been one of my favorite parts of this memory. It was somehow so significant to me that I'd not merely shared an episode of The A-Team with but actually been introduced in the first place to this decidedly modern, somewhat silly television show by my German, World War II-veteran grandfather. But when I tried to write this part down, I couldn't make it make sense. How could I possibly not have heard of The A-Team?
True, and as mentioned, we had only had a television for less than a year by the time of my grandparents' visit, but I was already a devoted student of the medium.
Each Sunday, I studied the Washington Post "TV Week" insert, not only to plan how I would use that week's allotted five hours of viewing time but also simply to read the synopses of pretty much every show and movie on offer on the three major networks, the local independent station (WDCA!), and PBS. (I also used to read and reread movie descriptions in the paper newsletter from Erol's Video Club. What can I say, there is evidence to suggest that I may have been a weird kid.)
So, I would certainly have been reading episode synopses of The A-Team, just as I would have been reading episode synopses of Knight Rider and The Fall Guy and Remington Steele. Presumably I would also have seen commercials for upcoming The A-Team episodes while watching other shows on the same channel.
Perhaps the explanation was that it had still been relatively new on the airwaves, I thought. Maybe my grandfather had become a devoted viewer over just a few months since the debut episode and I hadn't really internalized its existence yet.
One way to find out, of course. I googled, and I quickly found that I was correct, at least, in recalling that I had not heard of The A-Team by Christmas of 1982, because—as I learned—the show did not debut until January 23, 1983.
Not only would this have been at least two weeks after Oma and Opa departed for Seattle, it also gives the lie to the idea I always had that my Opa was already a regular viewer of this show, that he was in the weekly habit of settling down to watch it and so that was why we "had" to watch it on this particular occasion.
In other words, almost nothing from my long-cherished memory turned out to be true. If there really was something my Opa had had to watch on some night of this visit, it was probably a soccer game (if in fact those were even being televised in the U.S. in the early 1980s) or maybe simply anything, as long as it got him out of small talk in the living room.
For the kind of writer I am, memories are basically a stock in trade. When, from time to time, I have dabbled in fiction writing, I have found I am not satisfied by making things up. That's a reductive and in some ways completely wrongheaded gloss on the craft of fiction writing, I am aware—"write what you know," and all that—but my point is that one of the main compulsions behind much of my scribbling is to examine events from my past that are significant and worth a closer look (to me, anyway) mainly because they actually happened.
So it is disconcerting to the utmost to discover that something I've always believed happened actually never did.
There is some comfort in knowing I am not the only one so afflicted. Quick: Think back to that odious series of moralizing children's books featuring a family of anthropomorphic bears who are forever learning the importance of telling the truth, brushing their teeth, not talking to strangers, and so on. How was their last name—which also happened to be the last name of the husband/wife team that authored the books—spelled?
I was startled to learn recently that I am among a sizable number of people who remember it incorrectly, as "BerenSTEIN" when, in fact, all available evidence is that it is and always has actually been spelled "BerenSTAIN"—all available evidence, at least, in this "timeline."
Let me explain.
You see, the Berenstein/Berenstain mixup is but one example from a long list of similarly widely held but nonetheless apparently false memories. For example, the Fruit of the Loom logo never included a cornucopia; the absorbent undergarments are called "Depend," not "Depends"; the comedian Sinbad did not play the genie character in a 1990s movie called Shazaam because there was no such movie; and Nelson Mandela did not die in prison.
The phenomenon of these apparently false memories, which takes its name from the latter example (and the only one in the list I can confidently say I remembered correctly), is called the Mandela Effect. And the explanation advanced by some people for this effect is that these memories are, in fact, not false but are instead caused by some kind of glitch or leakage between the infinite number of parallel universes implied to exist by certain interpretations of quantum mechanics summed up under the heading of "the multiverse."
In the "multiverse," everything that could happen actually does, but in various parallel universes operating on their own timelines. Roll a six-sided die, for example, and somewhere there are five other universes where five versions of you each sees a different result from the one you see in this universe, but then—if I understand all of this correctly, and I really don't know if I do—there would also be additional complete sets of six parallel universes for each different haircut you could be sporting or shirt you could be wearing or name you could have been given, etc., ad literally infinitum.
In one of these universes, Mandela Effect believers would say, the bears/their creators were named Berenstein, and something happened that caused a bunch of us from that timeline to get sucked into this one. Or something like that. (Does this theory imply that there would also be a universe where the name of the authors and their bears is spelled Xhekdneidg, or is there some sort of quantum law of conservation of reasonably-related spellings?)
So I'm left with two possibilities.
Either my mind makes up stories to tell me about my past, or I've somehow been pulled from one universe—in which The A-Team, perhaps, debuted in January of 1982—to this one, in which it debuted in 1983.
Neither one of these possibilities is particularly reassuring, I must say.
