The Story I Remembered Wrong

When I was a little boy, my father told me a story about two boys, two rooms and a whole lot of horse manure.

Why this was considered appropriate material for a seven-year-old, I have no idea. Then again, horse manure is exactly the sort of thing that gets a seven-year-old’s attention.

The story went something like this.

There were two little boys. One was a hopeless pessimist. The other was an incurable optimist.

Their parents, having presumably tried everything else, took them to a psychologist.

The psychologist came up with an experiment.

It definitely wouldn’t get approved today.

He put the pessimistic boy into a room full of wonderful toys. Trains, bicycles, games. The works.

After a while, he came back to see how the boy was doing.

Badly.

The boy was miserable.

The toys might break. Somebody might take them away. Maybe there were better toys somewhere else.

Give this kid a room full of great things and he could find a problem with every one of them.

Then the psychologist went to see the other boy.

He had been given a very different room.

No toys.

Just a huge pile of horse manure.

When the psychologist opened the door, he found the boy happily digging through it.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

The little boy looked up.

“With all this manure,” he said, “there must be a pony in here somewhere.”

And that was it.

No burning bush. No tablets of stone. No expensive life coach.

Just a kid, a pile of horse manure and a missing pony.

And somehow that little story became one of the most important lessons of my life.

My father and me, probably Lake Tahoe, winter 1964-65

Of all the things my father told me when I was growing up, this is one of the stories that stuck.

I remember very clearly deciding which of those two boys I wanted to be.

I wanted to be the one looking for the pony.

This makes me sound much more philosophical at seven than I probably was. I was seven. I’m sure I had other things going on.

But something clicked.

I never made some grand decision to become an optimist.

I just liked the second boy better.

His approach seemed more useful.

That doesn’t mean I’ve spent my life believing everything is going to turn out great. It doesn’t.

Bad things happen. Plans fall apart. People disappoint you. Things go wrong.

Sometimes there really isn’t a pony.

But somewhere pretty early in life, I seem to have decided that when something does go wrong, I’d rather start looking for what can be done than spend too much time staring at what went wrong.

After a while, that became automatic.

I stopped noticing it.

Other people sometimes did.

Over the years, people I’ve worked with have often remarked on how calm and optimistic I stay when things get tough.

This makes me sound more evolved than I am.

Mostly, I just assume there’s probably a way through something and start looking for it.

Recording studios are particularly good places to test this theory.

They’re full of expensive equipment that can work perfectly for years and then suddenly decide that today is the day it wants some attention.

Computers are especially good at this. They can sense urgency in much the same way dogs can sense fear.

Cables have their own gifts.

But in most situations, my response is pretty much the same.

Okay.

What can we do?

Whenever somebody comments on this, it makes me happy.

Because I think I know where at least some of it came from.

A story my father told me when I was a little boy.

Recently I started wondering where he had gotten it.

Had he made it up?

Apparently not.

The story has been around for a surprisingly long time. The earliest printed version I found goes back to 1902, and over the years it changed as people kept retelling it.

By 1953 there was already a version with two very different children, a room full of toys, another full of manure, a shovel and a kid convinced that somewhere in there had to be a pony.

My father was born in 1939, so the story had been around throughout his childhood.

Maybe his father told it to him.

Maybe he heard it at school. Maybe from a friend. Maybe on the radio. Maybe he heard it from someone who’d heard it from somebody else. We’ll never know.

That’s one of the things I love about stories.

They travel.

We pick them up, change a word here and there, forget bits, improve bits, ruin bits, and then pass them on.

I like thinking that this one bounced around for decades until sometime in the late 1960s it reached my father.

And then me.

But while I was looking into all this, I found something much more interesting.

I had remembered the story wrong.

And not just some tiny detail.

I had changed a pretty important part of it.

For years, the version in my head went like this:

There were two boys.

There were two rooms.

But both rooms were full of horse manure.

At the end of the day, the psychologist opened the first door.

One boy was sitting in the corner crying.

Then he opened the other door.

That boy had spent the day digging tunnels through the manure.

“What are you doing?” the psychologist asked.

And the boy said:

“With all this manure, there must be a pony in here somewhere.”

Somewhere over the years, my brain had rewritten the story.

And here’s the strange part.

I think I like my version better.

Because somewhere along the way, my memory got rid of the toys.

It got rid of the fact that one boy had been given something wonderful and the other had been given something awful.

It got rid of luck.

In my version, both boys got exactly the same room.

The only difference was what they did once they were in it.

This was the lesson I had actually been carrying around all these years.

Not that optimists get better rooms.

Not that everything works out if you think positively.

Not even that there’s always a pony.

Just that two people can find themselves in exactly the same mess and react to it in completely different ways.

Somewhere along the line, my memory took the story my father gave me and changed it into the lesson I needed it to be.

I love that.