Waving to Jackie O

It started when Trench informed me that we have met Taylor Swift. I have no recollection of this whatsoever. It's true that in 2007 Trench and I went on vacation to Toronto with a friend of ours who went to the Taylor Swift show and interviewed her. We didn't go with. We dropped him and the car off in the parking lot of the auditorium, then walked downtown until we found a restaurant, and Interviewer Friend met us up after the show. Trench has a mind like a steel trap, though, so for awhile I was like, "Wow, I met Taylor Swift and don't remember it at all." (I'm fairly certain that's the impression Taylor Swift would have on me.) Finally I asked Interviewer Friend if he introduced us to Taylor Swift and he replied that he introduced us to her music, but not to her. Trench was adamant that when we dropped Interviewer Friend off, there was a van and a blonde girl was in it and we chatted with her for a bit. I'm just as adamant that this never happened. Interviewer Friend backs me up. Trench laughed and recalled a story on NPR about a husband telling the story about Jackie Onassis Kennedy waving to his wife on a street in New York, and his wife waves back till she realizes that Jackie O is just hailing a cab. The husband remembers everything about this story in great detail, but the wife insists that he wasn't even there, she was by herself.

I thought this was just a one time thing, but then it happened again. Trench started telling a story about the time we went to see Dancer In the Dark and how depressing it was, and after it was over we ran into a friend of ours who had taken a bunch of shrooms before the movie because he thought it was going to be a happy musical starring Bjork.

"Wait!" I stopped him. "That didn't happen to us. That happened to our friend, Mouse."

"No," Trench insisted. "I remember it. He was wearing those giant raver pants and a shiny shirt." (This was '00 people, ravers wore that stuff.)

"That's not our story!" I insisted right back, and texted Mouse, who replied that that indeed happened to her, and that she was with her ex-boyfriend. This has not convinced Trench otherwise. He still thinks we met Taylor Swift too.

Last week we were in New Orleans and we started telling a story to our traveling companions about something that happened to us our first trip there, ten years ago. It was our very first vacation together and one night we decided to go get tarot card readings. I went to this famous tea house first, and the reading was meh. Trench went to an occult bookstore, and he liked his reading, but it was mostly him and the tarot card guy talking about Alastair Crowley, so I don't think it was a reading so much as two geeks talking. Then there was this 19 year old indie kid who was standing outside some touristy store on Bourbon Street who told us he'd do a reading. And this was the real deal. He read our cards and our palms, getting detailed enough to say things like, "Okay, I can see that you have lower back problems, so make sure you're doing yoga." However, the best part was after he finished reading Trench's cards, I shuffled the deck and he laid out the cards for my reading, did a double take and said, "Whoa, dude, you have to look at this! It's the exact same cards except in different places!" It was a defining moment in our young relationship, where we knew, "Yep, this is it."

Until Trench mentioned that the kid had long blonde hair. I clearly remember him as having short, messy dark hair.

I tried so hard to brush it aside...it's just hair color, we both remember everything else the same way. But WTF! Blonde hair? Trench even described him as "elfin." So Legolas did our card readings? I remember him as Orlando Bloom without the wig. Am I the crazy one? Maybe I really have met Taylor Swift and saw a shrooming friend after Dancer In the Dark and had my tarot cards read by Legolas? Even scarier...have we officially become that couple who bickers over the small details of stories that happened years ago? I'm afraid the answer is yes. In the end, does it really matter if one of us or both of us waved to Jackie O as long as the story ends the same? Probably not.

But that tarot kid totally had dark hair.