Truthful Fiction and Making Up Names

For a while, I was stopped cold when it came to writing my stories about my dad. Have you noticed that? About a month ago, Mike asked me a simple question, "How is your story real if you don't put the difficult things into it, like the fact that your dad had a bad temper?"  I really didn't want to write about that.  I loved my dad.  I still do, but Mike's right, you know. It's all part of our story, the real part of who he was to me.

There's another problem I run into when I think about telling stories about my childhood.  Over and over, I've had arguments with my brother, sister, and mother about what really happened when I was young.  Of course, they're older and surely remember it all better than I do.  So when it comes to my stories, I figure they'll do the same thing, tear it apart looking for inaccuracies.  Someday they'll see what I've written, stories about when I was young, and they'll refute what is the truth for me.  I was brought up in a household where being right was almost as important as being smart.  I wish I'd been brought up feeling that kindness was the most important trait.  I know people who were and I envy them a great deal.  Finally, after a long time stewing about this problem of being right, I have the answer.

The stories that I tell are my truth. That truth doesn't belong to anyone else but me, so if that's the way I remember it, then it's fine.  That's the truth as I see it.  If anyone else needs to, they should think of it all as fiction.  The truth of a ten year old girl's story just has to be someone else's fiction, after all. How historically accurate could it be?

And with that, I started remembering the elusive names of the men my father worked with.  There were the easy ones, our neighbors.  These men rode with my dad to and from work every day for eleven years.  Then there were the others, the ones I didn't know as well.  They were the men who worked on the same projects with my dad.  Their very names feel right on my tongue.  The first time I flew in a plane was with one of these guys.  I'll tell you that story sometime.

But I have yet another issue.  Early on, I decided that I wasn't going to use people's real names here out of respect for their privacy.  So I'm not going to tell you these wonderful names that I suddenly remembered after not thinking about them for thirty years.  Then I went off in a whirl over names they could have had, names that put me right back into that place again.  Here are a few of the good names that I put together:

Ray Bechtel
Cecil Grimes
Eldridge Parsons
Virgil Stafford
Jimmy Jo Johnson
Noble Cox
Rex Smelzer
Dick Finkle

Aren't those great names for men who lived in the Midwest in the 1960s?  I can even picture which names match with different jobs and educational backgrounds.

See, I'm still not adjusted to having all this time to myself.  I need to get out to galleries and write about it.  I need to get a social hobby, as long as it doesn't involve working with 75 school children to hand stitch a book for each of them.  I'm not sure making up fictitious names fits that bill either.

Thanks for listening, jb