Once, while driving through the winding roads of the little town in which we lived, I saw something surprising and exotic. It seemed like ages before arrived home and I was eager to share with my family just what I’d seen.

“You’ll never believe what I saw on the way to the store,” I excitedly told them. “Just up the road, in a a field, as if it were the most normal thing ever, I saw a… it was a… I saw a giraffe!” They were amazed. Even a little bit unbelieving. And to tell the truth, so was I. I mean, I remembered seeing it, but there was something a little off. I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Months later, getting gasoline at a station near that same road, there, brazen as a summer day, in a horse trailer, was a camel being pulled behind a truck. Yes. That was it. I hadn’t seen a giraffe at all, it was a camel. A wonder to be sure, but not, as it turns out, a giraffe.

Because of this particular gaffe in my memory, I find it difficult to criticize Joseph Smith for telling people he was translating scriptures… from golden plates… shown to him by an angry angel… buried in a hillside.. whisked away, never to be seen again… instead of looking into a top hat at a “peep-stone”.

I mean, we’ve all done it, amiright?

Indeed, experts say the memory is a malleable thing and interviewers are specially trained to collect information without insinuating anything into the heads of the witnesses.

But it makes me wonder about a lot of other things I was told about Mormonism and its “truths”. If a rock in a hat can be mistaken for golden plates, a camel can be mistaken for a giraffe, when Brother Joseph said he saw God and Jesus, might he have been referring to a particularly delicious bologna sandwich and a cold glass of milk?

Asking for a friend…