Your truth or mine?

I’m getting older.  I’m nearly 30.  In fact, I’m really looking forward to being 30 and am considering forcing my husband to throw me a surprise birthday party for the occasion, but that’s not what I’m here to write about.  I’m here to write about something that happens when you age – your brain starts taking courses in creative writing and before you know it, it’s a very fine and fuzzy line between honest to Elvis memories and pure fabrication.  Usually, most things get a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B.  

It’s not like I intend to tell falsehoods.  I loathe dishonesty.  Sincerely, I can forgive darn near anything, but I have yet to truly forgive anyone for being dishonest with me (honestly – I hold this grudge like nothing you’ve ever seen.)  I am not perfect and have done many foul things in my life, but I own up to them, take the punch, and move on.  To discover that I have said some things that aren’t exactly true is hard for me to wrap my brain around, but it’s happening more and more frequently.

In my post yesterday, I wrote about getting my sister pantyhose.  Now, I know for a fact that I did it on more than one occasion, I remember several, but she says that it didn’t happen all that often.  Now, of course, the subject of the post was about me losing gifts and it’s possible that I just lost more than I found, but maybe she’s right.  Maybe I didn’t buy them for her as many times as I “remember.”

We all have “memories” that might not exactly be accurate.  She tells the story of me talking in my sleep and saying, “It’s in the pink.”  I do remember this event, it did happen, but it happened once.  In her mind (or in her stories,) it happened multiple times.  My brother “remembers” her picking bumps off a gourd (don’t ask,) but she swears he did it.  Who knows who’s right?  It was 20+ years ago! We’re all getting older (I’m the youngest,) and we’re all guilty of blurring the lines between reality and a great story – whether intentional or as a result of “Some-Timer’s Disease.”

But does it really matter if it’s true?  For years, I thought about the story of my father’s parents and chicken livers.  When my grandparents were first married, my grandmother made my grandfather chicken livers every single Sunday.  Every Sunday, he ate them.  This went on for ages until one day they had a fight and my grandmother shouted out something along the lines of, “Don’t tell me I don’t do anything for you – I slave to make you those chicken livers every single Sunday because you love them so much!”  To which he replied, “I wish you’d stop – I hate those things!  They’re disgusting.  I only eat them because you make them for me!”  

Good story, eh?  If you put just the tiniest bit of effort into it, you can see the lessons of honesty and communication, the story of a loving couple, etc.  Not a bad thing to take into a marriage, the moral(s) of this story.
But it’s not true.  Well, not entirely.  A couple of years ago, my Dad sat me down and told me that it didn’t exactly happen the way I had remembered it all these years.  Hmm.  Well, how about that?  Surely the story didn’t change – I changed, my memory of the story changed.

And does it matter?  Nope.  It matters so little, in fact, that I have again forgotten the true, real story.  The moral of the “truth” and the moral of my version of the truth are the same.  My memory brings to mind the same issues of communication, honesty, and the sacrifices of love as the real story.

In this holiday season, the issue of Truth comes up a lot.  Is there a Santa Claus? Did the oil keep burning for 8 solid days?  Are Dreydels actually fun?  Was there a baby that was born of a virgin?  Was he born to save the world?  

I say yes.  I say YES to it all.  It doesn’t hurt a bit to say yes.  It makes the holiday season brighter for me, it makes the magic real.  In this day and age of parenting and stuffing stockings myself, I can use all the magic there is.  The lessons of love and gratitude and appreciation and hope are the same, whether or not any of it is true.  In fact, if any of it isn’t true, I don’t want to know.  I want to keep on believing. I want to walk blindly through my beliefs for the next 70 years.  I want to keep the magic.

In 70 years, I’ll be 99 (almost 100) years old, my brother will be 105 and my sister will be 107.  We’ll probably never know what happened to all the pantyhose or for certain how many pair there were, my siblings will still be passing the buck on the gourd deal, I’ll still tell of the chicken livers, and I’ll probably still be known for saying, “it’s in the pink.”  None of it will be any more true then than it is now.  And it won’t matter any more then than now, either.

So bring on aging, bring on dementia, bring on creative memories and story telling. Bring on the creative truths.  After all, if it weren’t for those things, we’d not have Santa Claus, we’d not have Hanukkah, we wouldn’t have Advent and Christmas Eve, and we wouldn’t have the magic of Christmas and the delight in the eyes of children as they wake to find gifts magically strewn all over the living room and socks on the wall spilling with sweets and small treats.  And that, my friends, would suck rocks.