I suppose Mom
could have made a few lame decisions based on my cut-rate knowledge. Luckily our home life wasn't complicated and
we seldom dealt with situations in need of critical analysis. So, any decisions we made seldom hurt
us.
And as
Catholics we were encouraged ... at least by fifth grade teacher Sister
Wilomena ... to ask a priest for advice on our daily dilemmas, although none of
us would have been crazy enough to do so.
We’d discuss it from time to time ... we were Irish, after all ... but I
don’t ever remember any of us seeking counsel from Father McKulky. Maybe Dad did so in the years before Prozac
was invented and Mom began to use it to ease her bewilderment.
Mom was
never a great student. She had been
brought up by parents from another century ... she never said which. The
scientific marvels that thrilled us Moderns as we watched the Jetsons on
television in the 1950s often left Mom uneasy, as though the world she grew up
in was trying to sneak out the back door without warning her. The times were changing. Dad had already begun to use her
antimacassars for rags and us kids had dragged
the curtain stretchers down from the attic and used them to start a bonfire in
the back yard during a neighborhood Elvis record hop.
Mom
absolutely could not understand why mankind wanted to go to the moon. She told me there was nothing there to eat
and probably not much to do for entertainment.
She said traveling to the moon would be like a journey to Herkimer, but
it could take longer. Mom had never been
farther from home than New York City on her honeymoon, an event that blossomed
into a nightmare when she became separated from my father and lost on the
subway. Her rescue was rather routine,
but she sent a Christmas card each year to the policeman who reunited her with
my father. Asked if he thought Mom had
changed after New
York,
he said “Well, I wouldn’t trust her travel notes.”
As I
grew older and looked at my parents with
a more critical eye, I began to wonder if Mom was more likely than me to
misunderstand things. Dad said anything
was possible. It occurred to me that people don’t always consciously make
things up. Sometimes a strong need for something to be true will
convince a person it was true.
Of course,
facts are not always factual. I don't
remember being particularly interested in literal truth in my boyhood
days. Perhaps television was responsible
for my attitude. After listening to
hours of laughable advertising copy, I formed the opinion that anyone could say
just about anything they wanted and most of the audience would believe it,
whether they were my family seated around the dinner table at home or kids playing
in the baseball lot up the street.
In school I
was more careful about the knowledge I claimed in regard to one topic or
another. The nuns were astute women and dealt
severely with kids who tried to deceive them.
At home, I could get away with more stories, and I spun them at will
just to see the reactions.
As I
continued to make up stories, something began to dawn on me. I began to reject ideas I thought no one
would believe. And I began to see that
worrying about believability was essentially lying, which is an earnest desire
to convince someone of something that is not true. That’s not fiction. Fiction is different.
Soon came a
lesson. I floated a story in our
Cornhill neighborhood that newly elected Pope John XXIII was coming to Utica
and we should have a special welcome for him in our part of town. The arrival
of the Pope would have been a great story, but no one believed it. And there
lay the crux of difference between lying and Fiction.
Telling the
Papal visitation story turned out to be great fun, precisely because no one
believed it. It was so far-fetched that
listeners simply fell into the comedy of it without carefully trying to debunk
the story. Some even added their own
inventions to the legend.
"Would
the Pontiff be staying at the city’s posh Hotel Utica?” a friend asked my
mother.
"Oh,
no," said my beaming mother.
"He wants to get a place in North Utica so he can meet Annette
Funicello."
Of course, Annette
... of Mouseketeer fame, and later well known for her roles in beach party
movies ... spent very little time in Utica.
And no pope had left Rome in a few hundred years. But John XXIII showed great and surprising
leadership in his first year. One never
knew. You could run into the new Pope on
the Herkimer
Road
bus some day. He might be sitting with
the astronauts. Or with Annette.
So for me
Fiction became defined as a kind of being lied to that you could sit back and
enjoy. I could further say it was dissembling for the audience’s entertainment
instead of my own.
Some years later I thought I saw the Pope
and the Beach Blanket Bingo girl stumble across the lawn toward me at the
graveside service of my mother’s funeral. But it was a much older Uncle Jim in
his pajamas and robe. He sidled up to
me, dragging along the attendant they had sent with him from the nursing home.
“Were
you with her at the last?” he said.
“Yes,
Uncle Jim, I was.”
“Did
she mention leaving me any money?”
“No,
but she did say you could have her raccoon coat, the one she wore the night she
first met Dad at the campground years ago.”
“He
thought she was a bear when she ran up to him,” said Jim. “He almost shot her. There was something to
be said for formal introductions in those days.”
I
gave a great sigh and then said, “Her end was spectacular.”
“Oh? Please tell me.”
“An
angel with a flaming sword burst into the hospital room, but Mom resisted his
entreaty to come along with him.”
“My,
my ...”
“And
then he ran to the window, as fast as his little legs would carry him. He flew like a flash, tore open the shutter and threw up the sash ...”
“Was he wearing a red suit?”
“Yes! And there was
quite a commotion on the roof.”
“That’s
superb,” said Uncle Jim. “Carried off to
his workshop by eight tiny thingamajigs, no doubt. Did you make this up or did she?
“She
did, about a year ago.”
“You
trained her well,” he said.
“I
never taught her to make up stories,” I said with surprise and an edge to my
voice.
“I
can’t imagine,” he said, “where else she learned it from.”
“She
never told me any fiction,” I said.
“She
told me she was too embarrassed to show you, but she wrote them all down. Hundreds of stories. Some might sound familiar to you. Most are original. She was quite a story teller.”
“And
I never heard any of them?” I said.
“We
all heard her best. About getting lost on
the subway.”
“That
was fiction?” I said. “Why?”
“When
they came home two days late, your Dad was too embarrassed to admit he was the
one who got lost. Your Mom took the
rap.”
Eventually I
clung more solidly to Fiction and pretty much left lying behind. Lying to others only got me into trouble. Fiction brought a sense of being able to
paint the world in my own colors. Now
all I would have to worry about when I took up the brush was kidding myself
into thinking the world was as I needed
it to be. That would be enough
challenge for a lifetime.
copyright
2015 David Griffin
The Windswept Press
Murrells
Inlet,
South Carolina
dave@windsweptpress.com
