Sorting Out the Truth
Sometimes, learning the truth means letting go of even the most beautiful of untruths
When I was very young, we used to spend part of every winter on Sanibel in Florida. In the mornings, my grandfather would take me out on the beach to hunt for shells; a pastime for which the island is well-known. Even so, I was an uncannily good at it. I kept the best of these shells in a collection in my bedroom until seventh grade, when I glued them to a piece of plywood for a project on biomes that I titled “The Shells of Sanibel Island.”
When I got an F on the project, I was shocked.
I hadn’t taken the time to look up the origin of the shells, though I had used a shell book to find all their names. I’d found them all on Sanibel, so they must all come from Sanibel, right? It never occurred to me otherwise.
But my grandfather was both indulgent and creative, and it turns out the shells I was so uncannily good at finding were bought beforehand at a shell shop and he would walk ahead and drop them on the sand for me to find. The one that caught my biology teacher’s eye is found only in the Pacific ocean, not the Atlantic. The F stood; a rare black mark on my academic record (until I hit my undergraduate years, of which a spate are entirely marked in black, but that’s a story for another time).
This weekend, another treasured story turned out to be untrue; although it’s true that it’s a story my father told. It wasn’t one that was going to make it into the book, so it doesn’t derail anything in the way Mom’s last revelation did (though that has turned out to be very productive as I’m finishing the rewrites), but it’s a story I’m a little sad to lose just as I was sad to lose my sense of myself as preternaturally good at finding seashells.
I’m happy to come from a family whose secrets are often that this good thing which seemed to just happen was actually manufactured, instead of one whose secrets are about terrible things. Still, it can be hard to let go of treasured stories just because they turn out to be only that.
In your own research/writing, what treasured stories have you had to let go, friends?
Sarah -- Your piece could not have been more timely for me. I was just working with a genealogist and it looks like there were some exaggerating about the family history. I'm probably not Sephardic royalty and, I know it sounds strange, but it's hard to let go of something you've heard your entire life.
Well, my take from the shell story is that your grandfather loved you so much that he spent time and resources at some shell shop so that you could find the prettiest of the shells. There’s always a flip side.