When I was a teenager, my mother belonged to a ladies’ auxiliary
for the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. She hosted these
august ladies at a coffee one afternoon, and I helped out.
Mom had put out all her finery, including a heavy silver
coffeepot with a long spout. The first time I took a turn trying to
pour from it, there wasn’t much coffee in it. I tipped and tipped
and finally some coffee dribbled out — right into a woman’s
lap.
Well, one mistake, no problem. Next time around, the coffeepot
was full. I tipped just a bit, and a long stream of coffee poured
out, overshooting the target cup, and hitting a woman’s lap once
again.
I was dismissed from service.
I TOLD THIS story for years. Thing is, it was not true, not in any
part, not in any detail. (My mother had no such coffeepot, a
long-spouted pot does not behave in such a way, etc.)
For much of my life, I had an entire repertory of stories about
myself, all of them false. Certain cues would prompt me to pull out
one of my stories and tell it again. It used to be a burden to keep
them all straight and to remember when and where I had said
what.
The coffee klatch tale, trivial as it is, is the only one of
these stories I can now remember. I lost them shortly after the
summer of 1983, when I got sober, and when I accepted, in a number
of ways, that the jig was up.
I thought I would always remember my repertoire. I willingly
gave up telling those stories, but I expected (I guess) that I
would always recall them in some rue and embarrassment.
But no. They went away, vanished, blanked out. I vaguely recall
that some had to do with artistic exploits or sexual adventures,
but, beyond that, I couldn’t tell you what they were.
MY WHOPPERS came to mind in the past weeks, of course, because of
Hillary Clinton’s corkscrewing into Tuzla under sniper fire.
Someone in the commentariat, while raking Hillary over the
coals, recalled Bill Richardson’s reminiscence about being drafted
by a major league baseball team in his youth — also a falsehood.
Yet another pundit brought up Bill Clinton’s “remembering” fires in
black churches in his boyhood.
Come right down to it, Barack Obama seems to have invented an
entire adolescence, adopting second-hand the angst and anger of
people like Malcolm X and Franz Fanon. Edward Said made up his
oppressed childhood. Rigoberta Minchu likewise.
WE HUMAN BEINGS have an appetite for fable. Children tell tall
tales. Nigerian princes peddle stories of long-lost fortunes and
scam money from the unsuspecting on the Internet. I couldn’t begin
to fathom why.
But at some point, most of us grow out of the need to tell
stories. Some people apparently never do.
What am I trying to say here? Mrs. Clinton, I understand. I know
how it feels. But isn’t it a whole lot better to drop your stories
on your own, before somebody else exposes you and makes you look so
foolish?
