Screw It. From Here On Out I Am Just Going to Make Stuff Up.

Memories are tricky things.  Remembrance washes away the moles and freckles on the faces of the women I remember.  My recollections purge the halitosis, body odor and noxious flatulence of the men I knew and and counted as my buddies.  If  I didn’t like you your memory to me is a picture of a reeking, belching gas bag of troubled complexion.   Gone are any of the good acts or qualities of those that crossed me.  Their bad had become evil, an evil as hard as the marble of a cenotaph.  Much the same is true for the good I remember in people I like. In those I have liked or loved, their positive qualities have risen to the level of almost saintly perfection.  Their vacillation in decision making, the suspect motives of any particular action of their’s have been washed away. I am acutely aware that the  foibles of those we love drop off the organic record our brain keeps as the years pass.

But the realities of moments in our past are always much different then our memories of them. In each person cataloged in the back of our minds there is much more to  their motivations then our minds allow us to remember.  These people were carrying burdens, facing their own hard choices, were dealing with things we never saw.  We don’t know what occurred before they did whatever they did that has stuck with us through the years for good or ill. We will never know what nervous tick made them sneer so as to precipitate that punch we threw. We might not remember we were that person’s second choice as a date to the dance. 

Because memories are so tricky I kind of throw in with the magic realists.  I am more that happy to interject things that are impossible into my memories. A thrown punch becomes the tossing of rose petals that turn into brightly colored butterflies that melt off leaving only ethereal music. What does it really matter if in my memory of a high school brawl  I place a saint with white robes, a glowing aura and a halo seated at a cafeteria lunch table into the scene?  It does not even matter that in my revised memory he is eating a banana when he says, “You guys know this won’t turn out well, right?” . What does it matter if I make everyone more handsome and beautiful and two dimensional, either good actors or bad actors but give them white and black Stetson hats to differentiate their roles in my past?  And the cherubim and seraphim that are always at the edges of the scene offering commentary, well they are okay too.

Okay, okay I can’t do this with every memory, some are just too important to screw around with.  But hell, as I get older I am going to interject magic into more and more of my stories.  Clearly my dull life can use a few flourishes.  Instead of, “…and after he went to college he went directly into law school,” wouldn’t it be better if I went and studied with a sect of levitating monks in the Himalayan Mountains? Anyhow, embellishment of the truth is a long standing and time honored family tradition.  Life is better with magical realism.