Take the Spiced-Up Stories with a Grain of Salt — Then Savor Them for Their Flavorful Memories
On our way home from soccer practice the other night, my son Theo informed me that, contrary to my late father’s unassailable personal testimony, one cannot walk to school uphill in both directions.
“If you go uphill when you’re walking to school, then you have to go downhill when you’re walking home from school,” Theo put forth confidently, a sense of a-ha certainty punctuating his 11-year-old voice. All as we drove along the couldn’t-be-more-table-like prairie flatlands of Fargo, North Dakota, where nobody walks up or down anything.
“You can’t go uphill both ways,” Theo emphasized, resting his formidable case. “It’s impossible.”
“Are you calling my dad a liar?!” I shot back, positively incredulous at my dear boy’s newfound skepticism about the golden word of his trusted grandfather, Charles Edward Vogt — military veteran, beloved family man and friend, very tall and biceps-laden child of God.
<brief pause>
“Yes.”
<another brief pause>
“He didn’t walk five miles one way to school, either.”
“Five miles, five minutes. Tomato, tomahto,” I countered. “You’re so precise.”
Dad trudged through six feet of snow in the wintertime too — all of it coming in one epic storm, mind you — and sometimes he and the other kids had to push the school bus when it got stuck in the snowbank. Even though he wasn’t riding the bus. He was walking to school, after all. Five miles. Uphill. Both ways. But he somehow still had to push the bus once in a while when it got stuck in the snowbank. The snowbank created by the routinely occurring six-foot snowfall.
And to think he did it all barefooted.
What’s to be skeptical about? Geez.
Next thing you know, Theo and our other kids will be disputing Dad’s entire vault of rock-solid claims — like how, when he and his childhood friends went to the movies, they were all given a dime and the movie cost nine cents and the other one cent bought enough candy to fill half a grocery store snack aisle.
<brief pause>
If a penny got you enough food to stuff yourself for a week, then the nine cents must have gotten you one hell of a movie…
<another brief pause>
OK. It’s possible that maybe, just maybe, my dad was exaggerating ever so slightly in some of the stories he told.
Perhaps, as a young man serving in the Army at an air base in the San Francisco area in 1958, he did not in fact drive a car with a V-8 engine across the Golden Gate Bridge at a speed of 150 miles per hour, with the gas pedal only one-fourth of the way to the floor. And maybe he did not — well, not exactly — gas up that same car with spent jet fuel obtained on the sly from a storage bin at the base.
You don’t have to get all accuracy-schmaccuracy about it.
When I myself was a kid, my mom chased us around the house sometimes wielding an orange piece of Hotwheels racetrack, threatening to whip the disrespect right out of us scurrying mice if we didn’t start listening, and screaming like a banshee as she hauled out some of the only broken French she could remember from her Canadian childhood: “Toot dee swit! Toot dee swit!” (very incorrect language usage, written and verbal, for “Right now! Right now!”).
Actually, she once — one time — threatened to get a piece of said racetrack and swat us with it.
But it makes for a better story to, well, enhance the facts a little. Put the “creative” in creative nonfiction. Old people do it all the time, “old people” generally being understood to be anyone older than you, with a special lifetime exemption for you yourself.
So, you kids out there, you gotta take the old people’s stories with a grain of salt. They’re spiced up anyway. That’s what makes them so fun. And so memorable in an age when you’re all too distracted by your damn video games and your Snapchat and your dazzling Hollywood visuals and surround sound. (No, I’m not old. I have a special lifetime exemption.)
Sure, my older (there it is — old, old!) brother Mike probably did recoil in horror and despair years ago when my then-toddler son, Isaac, threw up all over the back of Mike’s brand new jeep on an otherwise beautiful winter’s drive by the St. Croix River on the Wisconsin-Minnesota border. Dear old Uncle Mike had brilliantly packed absolutely nothing to deal with a potential puker. Not that two-year-olds ever barf in cars along winding roads where their uncles are driving too fast, just moments after having fed their precious nephews pure garbage.
But no, dear old Uncle Mike probably did not actually grab Isaac by the back of his winter coat in sheer desperation and drag him back and forth across a nearby snowbank to scrape the vomit off of him as stunned Cheeseheads whizzed by on State Highway 35.
Yes, we really did have just three TV channels growing up. Four on a good day, if the antenna was working just right. And it’s true that my dad, by then a seasoned grownup, was a pioneer in the technology now known as the TV remote. I was the remote. Dad said “turn the channel” and I got up and turned the channel. With an actual knob. I was a human clicker, never buried with the old gum and chunks of cat fur and pencils with no erasers under the chair cushion, never out of AAA batteries.
But we — I — never really complained about our technological life, or lack thereof, back then. We didn’t feel bad about it. We didn’t feel anything about it, because there was nothing better to compare it to. It was just life. Life as Chief Channel Changer in my case.
But it wasn’t exactly entertaining. So if I’m going to talk about it now, to give you kids out there a sense of what it was like, well, you can’t really blame me if I decide to jazz things up a bit.
Old people do it all the time.
I’m a writer. An essayist, to be more exact. I tell stories here—true stories, from my own life, in hopes they will make a positive difference in yours.
I share laughs and tears, insights and observations, frustrations and realizations, relying all the while on the storytelling wisdom of Julia Cameron, author of The Right to Write.
It is a great paradox that the more personal, focused, and specific your writing becomes, the more universally it communicates.
Love it, Pete!!! Keep them coming!!!