Day 117: Inventions of the Mind.

I'm actually kind of freaked out that I was ever affiliated with the NRA to begin with, but that's another topic altogether ...

There's a book I use with older kids called Freak the Mighty, by Rodman Philbrick, and they pretty much love it across the board. It's not even the best Philbrick book (that honor would go to The Last Book in the Universe), but it's a very good read that gets them thinking about stuff I want them thinking about ("we're smarter than we think we are," "being different can be cool," "imagination rules" ...).

One of my kids was reading Freak aloud in session today when she got to the following line:

Remembering is a great invention of the mind, and if you try hard enough, you can remember anything, whether it happened or not.

My student, who's 11, looked up at me. "What does that mean?" she asked.

Ten minutes later she sort of understood - and half of my brain was off thinking about the quality of my memories.

See, there's no easy way to say this, but when I was a kid, I was quite the little liar. I was pretty smooth, too - at least in the moment. My downfall (or salvation, depending on how you look at it), came with a crippling inability to remember my lies. I'd spin a beautiful doozy one day and then contradict myself by naturally spilling the truth the next. Over the years, my lies slowed to a trickle - largely because I busted myself 90% of the time. (This, by the way, is a true fact to this day. I can still be counted on to expose my own lies, and fairly quickly at that. Needless to say, this keeps my lying to a minimum.)

But, back to the Philbrick quote. You can remember anything, whether it happened or not.

I include a fair amount of memories in this blog, and I've noticed that before I publish posts along those lines, I run them through my Revisionist History Truth-O-Meter. Is what I'm saying the actual real-live truth ... or some long-ago fib that's simply become the truth over the years?

Here's an example. When I was a kid at camp, I shot .22 rifles (at targets) in riflery class one year. I was actually pretty good for a 9-year-old, but when I came home that summer, being "pretty good" wasn't nearly good enough. I started telling people I'd made Sharpshooter. For years, I retold my lie, and by the time I was in college, I truly thought I'd been a little Sharpshooter.

Cut to several years ago, when I started archiving all my old crap and found my NRA Certificate from the Summer of 1972. I'd qualified as a Pro-Marksman (the lowest certification) - not a Sharpshooter. I was truly shocked and a little bit bummed ... "Sharpshooter" definitely sounds way cooler.

The truth is a slippery customer to begin with - sometimes it's black and white, but all too often, it's a matter of perception. As I move forward in this experiment, which is really just a search for my own truths, I sometimes run head-first into lies I've been telling myself for years. Most, like my shooting ability, are pretty innocent ... but others are much harder to face up to.

It's worth it, though. Remembering may be a great invention of the mind, but letting go of bullshit is a wonderful tonic for the soul.