When I was 7 years old I was very good with the hula hoop. Other members of my family struggled to keep it up, but I was a natural. I even overheard my dad observe to my mother – “Wow, hon, our Mar really does have a talent with that thing” – and I treasured that. My father praised me often, but not about physical achievements.

Like any praise, his words dimmed with time, and maybe it was to goose myself back onto a pinnacle that I made my bold claim: “I did the hula hoop a million times.”

“You did not.”

“Did too.”

“Not.”

“Uh-huh!”

“I don’t think so.”

“That doesn’t matter. I did it.”

The first time was with my friend Pam. After we went back and forth a few more times, she stopped arguing with me. We left the subject alone and started doing something else.

I had the same kind of experience with Nancy, with Ellen, and with Barbara. I told them I hula hooped a million times, they said I didn’t, I kept maintaining that I did, they challenged me a few more times, and then they stopped.

But I didn’t experience the emotion I thought I would. I seemed to prevail in my own praise, but I didn’t regain the satisfaction of hearing myself praised. It made me feel a little empty. I took the problem to my father.

“I did the hula hoop a million times, Dad.”

“You did not.”

“Did so.”

“Marilynn. You haven’t thought this through. You can count to one hundred, right?”

“Yes.”

“Now I want you to imagine doing that ten times. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“And now that you have imagined how long it would take to count to one thousand, I want you to consider doing that over and over again, one thousand times.”

“Huh?”

“Honey, there are…” and he did some figuring in his head … “about ninety thousand seconds in a day. It would take you over 10 days to count to one million, if you counted each second.”

Later I learned the other downsides to lying. It takes too much energy, and memory, to keep your story straight. It’s just not worth doing, unless it’s a bit of exaggeration to make a story better. It won’t satisfy you unless you believe it too, and that takes a lot of repetition, and if you succeed well then you’ve just managed to misremember your own life, and what’s the point in that?

I learned those other lessons later, but the hula hoop incident is when I discovered that just because a person doesn’t argue with you doesn’t mean he or she agrees with you.

You didn’t get away with it.

You got shined on.

(Update on March 27, 2014: I’m now revisiting some lessons and writing them up as narratives. That’s one of the lessons I’ve gotten through this — that people learn best from stories. People love stories. But writing memories as stories makes me consider the character and her surroundings and motivations. In turning this memory into Prevarication, I discovered that Wham-O didn’t introduce the Hula Hoop till 1958, so I was at least 8 when I learned about lying. And my physical memory has me on a curved driveway, meaning Chula Vista instead of Glen Cove, so now I know I was at least and probably 9.)