Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity Jig
Well, here I am in the land of snow and cheesesteaks. The parents are OK. The sibs are OK. Life is good.
My time sense is really screwed up so I’m wide awake in the middle of the night and ready to crash at 7:30PM. Getting better but still disorienting.
As I mentioned elsewhere, you CAN go home again, but it is a parallel dimension where you are still somehow a kid regardless of your age. My relatives have this image of me from my childhood and they are relating to me based on that. This used to annoy me, but I suppose I have mellowed. Now I find it kind of amusing.
Interesting to me how selective memory is and how malleable. Details of family stories transform, vanish or take on a previously unknown significance. Everyone writes the legends of their own lives and those around them. How can biographies be anything other than fiction or “enhanced realities?”
This is why I find “fiction” so significant. When stories are re-told, the details that survive, the details enhanced and the meaning of the story twist and turn down through time with astonishing flexibility. HOW they change has always fascinated me.
I was present at some of the events discussed in family stories. My version varies greatly. Who is to say mine is any more accurate than anyone else’s?