That's Mr. Prosaic Confabulation to you...

A good friend told me about how excited she was to teach college students the next unit in her writing course: memoir. Her students write about their favorite memory in as much detail and nuance as they can. Their stories pop with detail, bubble over with spicy particulars and sizzle with meaning when she's through.
It got me thinking about some of my favorite memories, one of which is completely fabricated. I'm not delusional about this memory--I know it never happened, but it feels as real as if it had. In fact, it seems more real than some memories which actually happened. Brains are so funny sometimes.

This memory is about time with my grandfather at my grandparents house, bordered by a small crick in the back yard. There's an old, rusting, wrought iron and cement bridge which crumbles at the edges in places and spans a very shallow sandy bed no more than 10 feet wide. Neighborhood kids have taken a dirt path to the bridge and crossed to school for generations. It's very unassuming, with simple chain links running along its profile, room enough for two children to pass, perhaps. Growing up, the boy cousins made boats from sticks and leaves to drop from the bridge and race until the end of the property, a mere 50 feet downstream.

One day when my little brother and I stay with my grandparents for the day, while our mum is at work, we decide to make boats with Grandpa. It means we get to go downstairs and work with him in his shop. Grandpa's shop had nearly everything in it. This is by virtue of the fact that a good dutchman throws away nothing if it can be of some use later, real or imagined. Waste not, want not, he always says. The dark side of this is his pickle "juice" drinking habit, balanced by the beautiful grandfather clocks my aunts and uncles all sport in their houses, which he constructed from kits he saved from dumpsters over the years. Grandpa's shop also has Werther's candies.

The boats we make are simple and flat, made in a boat-shape of course, with little keels on the bottom. We sand them down together and Grandpa helps us glue the keels to them. With the keels attached, we're faced with a decision, sail the boats now in the sofly burbling crick, or paint them and wait for them to be christened. Funnily enough, in the part of the memory that transpired in real life, I don't remember who made the decision, but we paint them. Mine is painted red and black; the little bro chooses blue with red. He writes our initials on them of course. That way they match every other item in our toy chest back home.

The painting was the point at which events passed from fact into the realm of fiction, constructed from desires in a child's mind. I don't know at which point the following became entrenched in my memory, vivid as the sun on the dull red brick outside my window, but my tangled mess of neurons holds onto it tenaciously and naïvely.

In my memory, we take our painted boats to the back yard instead of piling into our old and worn, red minivan. We drop the boats in the crick with Grandpa and walk along the bank through neighbors' backyards as the boats slowly drift along the current. The sun shines through the pine trees leaving dappled patterns on the brown, soggy leaves that are left in the spring after the snows finally melt. The afternoon feels golden, lit like the artificial set of a movie. My little brother isn't even part of the memory at this point, poor fellow. In fact, no boats float in the stream, we just walk. It ends there--my Grandpa and me, strolling along the bank. A simple pleasant memory.


The detail about the lighting is probably what tipped me off initially about the falsity of the memory. That and the speed of the crick. In the spring, the crick becomes a creek, moving swiftly and bone-chillingly from the snows dripping in; wade after boats at the peril of your warm tootsies.
Though it's fraught with errors and inconsistencies, I treasure this memory of my Grandpa. This is the memory I wanted to have with him. I wanted it so much that in my mind, it happened.

I shelve it in my brain along with the real memories of my Grandpa. It sits next to us fishing for catfish with my cousins on the side of a channel (We ate those terrible, bottom-feeding fish later. Boiled. I didn't have fish for years because of this.), sits next to camping trips with him listening to Rush on a picnic table with kids cavorting loudly around him, next to uncles and aunts skiing behind us in his ancient, rickety, underpowered fishing boat, next to Sunday afternoons eating pot roast, green bean casserole and mashed potatoes, and hearing him pray for the "lost and sorr'ing (sorrowing) ones".

I don't know why I fabricated this memory, or even if it was on purpose. I'm going to leave it there though, because if I had asked him to, Grandpa would have walked that crick for miles with me.