A story confirmed

You live long enough, you end up telling stories long after you are able to recall the actual experiences that they are based on.

That sentence is a little abstract, so let me explain. A long time ago, I hung around a yacht club here in the province. I hung around several of yacht clubs along Lakeshore in Montreal and in West Quebec. Anyway, this one club had a girl whose name was unfortunate. I can't tell you what it was because, unlike other girls' names I may have cited here, hers was an uncommon enough combination that it wouldn't be at all hard for someone to make the connection to the real woman.

Put it this way, if your last name was Carr, you wouldn't name your daughter Iona Carr (say it out loud) would you? Well, imagine that you had a last name that would make the perfect stripper/porn star name if you matched it up with a certain first name. No reasonable, caring parent would do that to their daughter would they? Well, they did. And the girl in question grew up to have the body type and personality to go with it when she hit thirteen. That's the story I have been telling anyway.

I couldn't tell you what exactly she looked like anymore. In the story she was a brunette, had a beautiful body and owned more bikinis than anyone I knew then or since. Whether she owned many other clothes was an open question because you hardly ever saw her at the club in anything but one of those bikinis.

She made a good story. I always brought her up when unfortunate names came up in conversation, which happens in my life every few years or so. (the last time it happened, a bunch of friends were sitting around having coffee on Sunday afternoon and one of the group, reading the newspaper, happened to notice the obituary of a Major Harry Dick.)

Although I keep her story in my repertoire, it's now more than thirty years since I knew her; although the story is well entrenched in my memory, the actual experiences are gone. And sometimes when I've telling it lately I've seen people's faces while they are listening to me and I've thought, they don't believe me. And then I'd wonder, is it true? Could I prove it? And I know that there are other stories that I and others I know tell that have subtly changed over the years. They've been streamlined and improved. Sometimes certain facts come to light that show me not only that these stories have drifted away from the truth, sometimes they show that the stories have come to have a point exactly opposite to what follows from what actually happened.

This story about this girl and her name started to feel too good to check, as the old journalists' joke had it. And I thought, maybe she didn't actually have that name. Maybe one day we were all sitting on the rocks at the yacht club drying off after swimming and someone said, maybe she even said it herself, "It's a good thing you weren't named X." And I, to improve the story, started telling it as if it was actually her name and eventually forgot that it wasn't.

Except, it seemed to fit other memories of that period. This particular yacht club was a bit of a budding grove in those days. There was a whole flock of girls who were just exquisite and I remember some of them talking about her. Having another girl who is a little too wild or a little too obvious in her manner to tell stories about is a very important part of every teen-aged girl's life, and I remember that this girl was the one that played that role at the club. She was a couple of years younger than the girls I knew best but I think I remember them talking about her with a certain tone. No sordid details were ever trotted out—that just wasn't done in those social circles—but the implication was always obvious enough.

I also think I remember looking at her and thinking I saw certain characteristics in her; I thought I saw a flirtatious, teasing attitude. I think I remember seeing her and other boys, several other boys, and something about the way they interacted suggested that they were familiar. And then there were all those bikinis. In those days the vast majority of women wore one-piece suits—to wear a bikini was a fairly aggressive fashion choice, to own an entire drawer full of them was like slapping people in the face with your sexuality.

Part of it, again I think, was that her family had a cottage within walking distance of the club. On a hot summer day, it made all the sense in the world for her to pull her bikini on and walk down to the club. Other girls who drove or rode their bikes wouldn't feel quite so comfortable dressed like that. And maybe she went up the hill with a boy now and then and during the week her parents worked and they weren't at the cottage except on nights and weekends. Yeah, that's it; I remember. Or am I imagining? I never went up the hill to her cottage.

She was also richer than most—a relative term because everyone at the club was comfortably in the upper middle class (go ahead and hate us for that if it makes you feel better). But to own a summer place on the shore where the yacht club was located was really something. In those days the upper middle class dressed differently and—as odd as this will seem today—girls in it were more willing to emphasize their femaleness (not just their femininity) than the working-class girls in town, who would often put T-shirts on over wet bathing suits the second they stepped out of the water.

Anyway, given that I only have these facts from the story I have been telling and can't call up any memories from the time, was she really like that or did that image get imposed on her because of that name?

Another funny thing about living long enough is that you start to get a sense of how the stories turn out. I know how most of the other girls who were just ripe to budding those few summers many years ago lived their lives since. I know what kind of stories they had. But hers I don't know. She was one of those people who just disappears out of your life.

I do know that some of those other girls-now-women—the ones whose stories I do know—have lived lives that were not unlike the ones implied for the girl with the unfortunate name. But what about the girl herself? Well, I'm sorry to have to report that her father just died. I saw his name in the obits just the other day. This story had begun to haunt me and when I saw his name, a name I could not have produced out of my memory five seconds before seeing the obit, I suddenly "remembered" him. And clicked on the obit and read it. He had only one daughter and she was the one. And yes, she had that name. She's married with two sons now and she didn't keep her maiden name. I wonder if she hated it?

I wonder how much of the rest of the story I think I remember is true? I have to admit that—as sorry as I was to see her father has died—I was also relieved to see the obituary because it confirmed my memory. Not because I think my memory is fading. I was relieved because I had some of my faith in stories reaffirmed.