always right, sometimes wrong

Why do you always have to right, I remembered John saying.

It was a complaint, a charge, part of a fight.

He never understood that in my own mind I was never right.

The memory of her dead husband comes up when Joan Didion is on a small plane with her daughter. It’s essentially an ambulance, her daughter being flown to a new hospital. 

One of the paramedics had a digital camera and was taking pictures of what he kept referring to as the Grand Canyon. I said I believed it was Lake Mead, Hoover Dam. I pointed out Las Vegas. The paramedic continued taking pictures. He also continued referring to it as the Grand Canyon.

Clearly Didion is annoyed by the misidentification — and the paramedic’s seeming insistence on it.

All right it’s the Grand Canyon, I thought, shifting position on the bench over the oxygen canisters so that I could no longer see out the window.

If she could see out the window, Didion would continually be confronted by the truth, which she feels compelled to defend, so she chooses to look elsewhere. 

“You always have to be right.” Kent said that to me once. It took me aback in that it was a charge I could have leveled at him. By this time I had also learned that if he called me on something — and I said you do that too — it was just going to escalate the argument. So when Kent accused me of always having to be right I had to pause to consider. I want to be right. Nobody wants to be wrong. I doubt Joan Didion seriously thought she was never right. But even when we are pretty solid on something, when challenged, we do for a moment wonder. If I think one thing, and someone else says different, there’s an instability. 

“I don’t think of it as having to be right,” I said. “I think of it as making sure I understand, that I’m not confused.” 

I am glad we have these magical research devices at hand, our phone/computers, and can quickly find a definition of a word or double check which president came after Wilson. I have absolutely no interest in being the One who is right. I want everybody to be right. 

Were I in Joan Didion’s situation, likely I would have dropped the issue, too. Who cares if somebody you will never see again misidentifies the landscape? Sure, you could turn around to the people on the plane and go, “Paramedic and I are looking down and he sees the Grand Canyon and I see Lake Mead. What do you guys see?” 

I try not to accuse people of being wrong. I try to be diplomatic, seek common ground, appeal to a neutral authority. But I’m human. I say, no, that’s not right. I don’t believe that. Really? Come on!

source:

The Year of Magical Thinking

by Joan Didion

2005. Vintage / Penguin Random House, New York