The Alligator Story and the Nature of Memory

– Louis Bickford

The other day, as I passed a magazine stand, I remembered the alligator story. 

One of the magazines had a photograph of an alligator on it, and the story suddenly popped into my head. This was a memory trigger, so I paused to make a note of the memory, which has two parts.

The first part is a factual historical recounting of an event: Many years ago, when my son Eli was about five years old, we were in Louisiana, and we saw an alligator in a swamp. It was far off in the distance, perhaps a hundred yards away, but it had an unmistakable form and movement. Even without binoculars, I knew what it was and wanted to get a better look, so we walked closer to the edge of the swamp, still a safe distance away from the mucky shoreline and even farther from the reptile on the opposite shore. The alligator’s shape came into greater focus and we watched it for a few moments. Eli was thrilled but a bit frightened and asked if there was any danger. I assured him that there was none.

The second part starts with a conversation a dozen years later.  We were discussing being in Louisiana and seeing an alligator, and Eli remembered it differently. He remembered being genuinely frightened, and had a strong memory that I had actually placed him in harm’s way, taking an unnecessary risk with a child. He remembered it as an irresponsible parental moment. I assured him and convinced him that there was no actual danger. We have both now revised our memory – a shared memory – in line with both the facts (there was no danger) and our respective subjective experiences (I thought of it as a fun and entertaining teachable moment, while Eli remembers feeling frightened).

I recorded this story as an audionote in MindStory: The Personal Memory App™, which took about three minutes. The app generates a transcript and preserves the audionote. The AI tools also instantly provide auto-tags, like “Eli”, “Louisiana”, and “Alligator” so if I want to find all the stories about Eli, for example, I can organize all the entries by using that tag. 

Having a private and secure archive of memories and stories from my past is important to me. Perhaps one day I will share these. Perhaps not. For now, they are my own way to preserve my memories and reflect on my personal history. 

This story in two parts also helps differentiate between Memory and History. At least as ideal types, History is factual and Memory is subjective. Of course we know that this is too simplistic. Historians bring their own biases to the study of history, for example, and there are multiple different methodologies for the professional study of the factual record, hence the field of historiography, which identifies these different methodologies. 

Memory, too, is not quite so simple. The alligator story also shows how the factual record is an important component of memory, as well as history. It is important to get the facts right, or mostly right, even if selectivity (what we choose to remember) and subjective interpretation is always at the core of memory.

The psychologist Jerome Bruner spent decades exploring how we construct our lives as narratives, arguing that autobiography is not simply a record of what happened but an active process of meaning-making. In Bruner's view, we are constantly revising our personal stories to maintain coherence and align with our evolving sense of self. The alligator story exemplifies this process perfectly. When Eli and I sat down years later to discuss that Louisiana afternoon, we weren't merely comparing factual records—we were engaged in what Bruner would call "life-making," negotiating a shared narrative that had to accommodate both our experiences. My initial telling emphasized adventure and education; Eli's recollection foregrounded fear and vulnerability. Through conversation, we constructed a revised version that honored both perspectives while establishing the factual parameters. This is the essential work of personal memory: not to preserve an objective record, but to create meaning that serves our ongoing relationship and our individual understandings of who we are.

Cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser made crucial contributions to understanding how personal memories can be simultaneously vivid and inaccurate. His research demonstrated that the confidence we feel in our memories often bears little relationship to their factual accuracy—we can remember events with crystal clarity while getting significant details wrong. Neisser distinguished between the emotional truth of a memory and its factual content, showing how both matter but serve different purposes. In the alligator story, Eli's memory of danger felt absolutely real to him, even though the factual record confirms there was no actual threat. His fear was genuine; the distance and safety were also genuine. Neisser would recognize this as characteristic of autobiographical memory, which preserves not just events but our subjective experience of those events. The photograph of the alligator that triggered my recollection functioned as what Neisser called a "repisodic memory"—not the original experience itself, but a subsequent remembering that has become part of the memory's texture. Each time we revisit a memory, we subtly reshape it, adding layers of interpretation and present-day understanding.

The narrative psychologist Mark Freeman has written extensively about how we reinterpret our past selves from the vantage point of hindsight, arguing that the meaning of our experiences often only becomes clear much later. Freeman uses the term "the priority of the present" to describe how our current perspectives inevitably shape our understanding of what came before. When I looked back at the alligator incident from my vantage point now, I saw it through the lens of my accumulated parenting experience, my knowledge that Eli grew up healthy and confident, and my own fading anxieties about childhood risks. Eli, now an adult himself, reinterpreted a childhood moment through his mature understanding of actual versus perceived danger. Freeman would argue that neither of us could access the "original" memory untainted by subsequent experience—all we have are our present-day interpretations of past events. This doesn't make memory unreliable so much as it reveals memory's true purpose: not to function as a neutral archive, but to help us understand who we were, who we've become, and how we got from there to here. The act of recording the story in MindStory doesn't freeze that process; it creates another layer of interpretation, a present-day decision about which memories matter enough to preserve.