thanks for the memory...

sometimes i have memories that seem very vivid to me but i really have no idea whether or not the "remembered" events actually happened. or i know that something happened, but i don't know if my personal recollection resembles reality at all. and sometimes i have childhood memories of things that did happen but i also dreamed about them so i have a series of random fleeting images in my head and i don't know which ones belong to history and which were concoctions of an inventive child's REM sleep. i also wonder, when i think back on some of the more impressive images from my young life, what those things really looked like. for example, the brothers made enormous snow forts when we were young. they built tunnels into the giant hills that snow-movers made and hollowed them out so we could have hide-outs during the perpetual snowball wars that dominated winter days. i realize that this behavior is not unique to my childhood and that children still do this very thing, but the forts seem so pathetic now. and i can't help but wonder, did i simply carry the perception of a 3'5" child forward into my adulthood? i believe that i can remember walking around inside the snow bunkers, occasionally stopping to rest in one of the snow chairs that had been carved out of the inner wall. but were they really that big or did they just seem that big relative to my significantly smaller stature? i want the world of my childhood to be as enormous and fascinating as it is in my memory, but it is entirely possible, in fact likely, that the world now is exactly the same now as it was then. i am just looking down at more of it now.

in the same lot where the brothers built the forts, there were some "dirthills" in the summertime. we used to take our bikes to the dirthills (located 1/2 block north of my house) and ride up and down and over and off the hills. the ruts were so deep and the hills were so steep and the activity was always ripe with potential to wipe out and find yourself with a mouthful of dirt and rock. we were so daring and so adventurous! or were we? i don't know. i have no idea how steep those hills were. i don't recall if i ever actually jumped off of a hill or not. perhaps i only recall imagining what it would be like to do so. or maybe that was one of my dreams. i did dream of the dirthills a few times.
sometime before i turned 10, those dirthills became the foundation for a very large apartment complex and the real memories of what we did there have faded intensely over the last 20 years. and the snowforts seemed to stop sometime around there too. or maybe we stopped being allowed into the snowforts at that time. either way, the memory is a dim one.

often when i try to recall the life of small blond shelly (as opposed to larger brunette shelly) i realize that the recollection is simply a memory of the re-telling of an event, not the event itself. for example, i don't really remember the time that i was riding my bike "double" with one of the younger neighborhood girls and we wiped out and her face was bleeding from somewhere. eyebrow, maybe? but i vividly recall exactly how i told the story. so i spend a lot of my time pondering what really happened and how much of my life i am trying to retrieve from already secondary interpretations. but when i write about my childhood, i do so as honestly as i can. i don't make up stories (intentionally), and i don't exaggerate (on purpose...well, only for dramatic effect) but i also don't really know what actually happened. and certainly a different character from the story were to take over narration, there would be significant differences. imagine if my brother were the one speaking in the first person...
i think about the media hullabaloo (thanks for the word, sara) that bombarded mr. frey and i wonder who is drawing this line between fact/memory and fiction/creativity. if someone were to try to nail down a one word, yes or no answer to the question "are these stories all true?" i would honestly have to answer, "how the hell should i know!?" i am not sure that i can tell you what actually happens in most interactions i have with people today. but i ALWAYS have an interpretation.