This story I’m about to tell you did not exactly happen the way I put it down on paper but it is a true story (mostly) anyway. That is because of my memory being so poor that I cannot swear I got all the facts right. If I could have remembered more of the details the way they really happened, I would have set them down just as faithfully as I could.
The truth is, as I went spinning along from one character’s surprised face to another’s angry and flushed demeanor, I began noticing certain inconsistencies popping up. It done surprised me at first as I have always trusted my memory and knew the stories in my head to be reasonable facsimiles of the truth. I kept going, sentence after sentence, but by and by I noticed how certain “facts” collided with others in such a way that if one were right the other must be false . . .
Have you ever had something in your head, a memory from your past, that you feel sure is 100% accurate? Nobody can tell you different, whether the memory is about a school day, a party, a vacation, a sad or happy occasion. You can believe something a certain exact way for years on end and never ever question its certificate of authenticity in the least way . . . and then one day you come across a friend or relative with a different account and a way to prove your memory isn’t half as accurate as you thought!
Sometimes the revelation may come about because of a piece of written paper, like remembering being at a friend’s wedding on such-and-such a day and then you see the certificate-of-bliss and you discover your memory is wrong! Suddenly you realize that it is you who are wandering aimlessly about in memory-land without a compass and you are forced to ask yourself: what the heck was in my head all that time? What seductive lying memory trick was sitting there all smug-like and bragging about how perfect it was?
What weird mix-up in the brain brags about its own perfection when the memory’s neuron map turns out to be defective and should be returned to the shop right away for some serious fixing?
It is only because of my age, as the years slowly creep upward toward the longevity blues, that it is necessary to confess that these newly discovered question marks with my memory prevent me from claiming the following story is perfectly true in all respects, because I know now beyond a certainty of doubt that I cannot guarantee all of the details to be truly accurate so it’s best I make no such claim in the first place, as I said at the start, although I should say also, in fairness to myself, that the following dramatic account is a true tale and to keep in mind that I only decided to change a few names here and there to protect the innocent from unwanted public exposure and also that I made some parts of it up out of whole cloth and in a few other places I lied quite a lot to make things seem a little better or worse than they actually were and to get all the characters to come out even in the end and of course as is true for any writer it became very necessary to exaggerate and embellish in sometimes unforeseen and even incomprehensible ways whenever the mood struck or whenever I forgot the main story line (which happened more often that you would guess) but I swear on a stack of bibles that despite it all the following story I am about to tell you is the real truth without hardly a false lick in it anywhere that could affect or damage the reader’s thought process involving knowledge of self or of life or of any other earthly phenomenon as we perceive our own existence: truth is truth, even when a whole lot of lying is involved, as you shall soon see.
–The Author (with intermittent episodes of lucidity)
Doggone luck, I’ve forgotten the story I was going to tell you!!
