~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Age seems to color memory; the stories get better.
Enhanced by a bit of rearranging of sentences and paragraphs and chapters, my stories suit me or they’re tossed. I alter dialogue. I get tired of always being the spineless wimp in my true memories, so periodically, I make myself the hero. After 50 years I no longer have to feel embarrassment for a treppenwitz, a Yiddish word for tripping on one’s wits; i.e., wishing you’d come up with a brilliant rejoinder to the person who said to you, “Didn’t you used to be fat?” Now, I can pretend I was a rapier wit: “Funny you would be thinking that,” I say in my rewrite. “It makes me recall the day your slip fell off on stage.” This is particularly good when she says it wasn’t her this happened to and I can say, yes, in my memory it was certainly you.
It seems a lie, to change the storyline, but I suspect we all do it, just to be able to live with ourselves and the blank-brain syndrome as well as the marginal things we’ve done. I’ve been on the planet in this incarnation approximately 25,550 days; that’s a lot of memories to recall, forget, remember again, re-digest and – with slight of mind and hand – rewrite.
Some folks claim total recall of people and events and conversations. I once thought these kinds had unusually brilliant minds, but now I think they’ve taken a lot of notes. Or, they’re making it up.
I believe we all have Walter Mitty in us; some of us, a bit of Ulysses, he of the sirens and scrapes with death. If we want, we can be godlike in telling tales of the times we’ve walked on water. We can be dictatorial editors under the skin, making ourselves look wittier than our mothers, brothers, spouses and bosses, not to mention insignificant strangers who’ve gotten the better of us. With my own seemingly endless years of material, I can manage to be novelist rather than reporter.
This fictional approach to personal history is not a bad way for us humans to be. Most of us lead lives as interesting as a grocery list, so this way, whatever our mundane pasts, we can titillate our friends with good rather than dull tales. As they can, too. Who wants a friend who tells us how she did the washing on Monday?
In my own quiet hours, I no longer have to contemplate my history of commonplace events when with a dollop of creativity I can enjoy a past verging on the heroic, worth a scintillating obit . . . which of course I’ll have to write myself.
