Document! Document! Document!

About a year ago, I spotted a chicken dish on the front cover of an Olive Garden menu and decided to give it a try with a simple point from my finger. Little did I know that the dish I chose would become one of the best served chicken I ever experienced. I remember it being softer than a soft porn with a melt-in-your-mouth quality; so much so that I, at one point, honestly thought I was eating fish and questioned the waitress’ order accuracy. I went back to Olive Garden three more occasion after that, the third of which started off disastrous. To my surprise, the menu had changed and the chicken dish that I had grown to depend on for my happiness was gone.

By now you must be wondering of the details of this dish; hoping that my vast vocabulary would do as much justice as it possibly can for this entrée that I hold on a golden pedestal. Was it served with rice or in a marinara sauce? Was it accompanied by the very bones that it grew accustom to or separated prior to meeting the pan? Was it even a pan that it was prepared on?

Sadly, I must confess that despite the praise I cannot, for the life of me, remember a single detail besides the tenderness. Do not misunderstand, I never forgot the impact that the meal had on me for this is not the first time that I have mentioned it. However, it seems that through the course of a year, my words and perception of said meal may or may not have changed, in turn making it impossible to render it to any degree. To paraphrase, through describing the dish in glorifying nature, I have lost track of what is truth, thus confusing myself on the very identity of it.

“Preposterous!” you may shout. “How can the best thing you’ve ever eaten be forgotten so easily?” And my rebuttal is, “Shut up, this is my article and you will read on!”

In the introduction of David Carr’s The Night of the Gun he writes;,” there are three sides to every story, my side, your side and the truth.” And I don’t think that it’s about forgetting at all. Nor is it lying. Indeed, that chicken entrée that once shone on the Olive Garden menu was the best I ever had but its absence since then prompt my mental perception to enhance its features, enhanced it beyond recognition.

It’s funny how our memories work like that. In a desperate attempt to preserve something special we destroy the very details that made them that way. So don’t make the same mistake that I did. Document! Document! Document!