Sputterpub's Blog

When I was maybe 4 or 5, I started to understand dreaming.

The girl next door was a year or two older than I, beautiful, and kind enough that I imagined we could be best friends. Looking back now I have no idea why Barbara was so nice to me, but then I realize I never saw her with a friend at her place, never heard of her seeing a friend elsewhere, and I wonder what the story was in her house.

Barbara has nothing to do with this memory, except it was through her that I knew about the candy. For one thing, she was Catholic and so of course she had Christmas. But of more importance was her uncle’s newsstand/soda fountain/candy shop, a place where Barbara and I were permitted to spend an occasional afternoon. And help ourselves to whatever we wanted.

Somewhere in all the Christmas hoopla I became acquainted with the candy stocking. Knee-sock shaped and made of netting, it was filled with colorful non-chocolate holiday treats. You know: those shiny ribbon pieces and striped mints and jelly-filled lozenges. I was dazzled. It was my first cornucopian experience. It was a see-through thing of bounty, a glorious Ali-Baban treasure of sweets.

I saw them. I wanted one. I yearned in vain.

So I dreamed one. In my sleep I received a net candy stocking and I was happy, until I awoke and it was gone. I was disappointed and puzzled.

I managed to dream of the candy stocking again. This time, remembering how it slipped through my possession somewhere between dreamworld and waking, this time I carried the dream stocking to my dream bed and shoved it under my dream pillow. Then I got into my dream bed and went back to sleep until I woke up. I grinned and reached under my pillow and…

Learned something important about dreaming. There was no candy stocking under my pillow.

We all know dreams aren’t real. The dream candy experience showed me that I can be aware of how dreaming works while dreaming, and that I can become aware, just a bit, that I am dreaming. That awareness distills all terror out of the experience, and what is left is good.

     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.)