So, tonight I was at a party, thrown by my grandfather and his wife of one year. My parents were there as well. At one point, I was talking about writing and my father chuckled and mentioned that he’d read some of my blog posts. I guess my sister has directed our parents to some of my posts that involve the family.
One post in particular had amused my parents. (It’s always good to know that I have made someone chuckle, by the way.) The post was about Christmas Traditions. I talked about the care my father took with putting up the lights on the tree, spending hours on getting them just right. I also wrote about how very many lights there were on our trees, thousands maybe.
Well, tonight, my father disillusioned me. He laughingly told me that it’d taken him 15 minutes at best, and that he’d just shoved the lights on any which way, so long as they were evenly around the tree. He was eager to get that finished so that he could sit back and relax while we decorated the tree. Oh, and there were probably only a few hundred lights on the trees, not thousands.
My ever so loving husband proceeded to taunt me about my perfectionism with the tree lights on our trees in the past. I admit I used to get a bit … perfectionistic … when hanging the lights. Ok, so I was so bad that I wouldn’t let Toph near the tree because he never did it just the way it “was supposed to be done.” Thank goodness for prelit trees now. I no longer have to focus my perfectionist principals on a tree each year.
My father lovingly said that he’d had to remind himself that my memories are through the eyes of a small child. A small child who idolized her father, who thought he hung the moon and stars, no less.
Interesting anecdotes are not fiction by themselves. They need the sandpaper touch of art. We do not revise reality. Or at least we do not revise it artfully enough, though my children tend to stand behind me and crook their fingers like quotation marks when I discourse about things in their childhood, citing “author embellishments.” By Jane Yolen, in Take Joy: A Writer’s Guide to Loving the Craft
While taken slightly out of context, as she’s talking about how an anecdote is not fiction, even with “author embellishments,” unless it is given a life of it’s own beyond mere fact reporting, it reminded me of the incident earlier in the evening with my father.
I have written about memories often on my blog. They are childhood memories and not always clear, sometimes even romanticized. Does that make the memory any less valid? Does that make the memory any less special? They are not purposeful “author embellishments” but I’m sure I, like most people, do embellish a bit. Poetic license, isn’t it called?
I still like to see my dad as a larger than life persona. He is still the dad who can do no wrong, in my eyes…despite the fact that we do have various differences of opinion on things. I still strive to find approval and pride in his eyes when he looks at me. I still think he could hang the moon and the stars if he wanted to…but I don’t know that he’d do it just for me anymore. Maybe I don’t want to know about the lack of truth in my memories, though. I think I like to see my childhood through my thousand-light-bulb sunglasses.
