Blog #1: A Study in Swing Sets

It's hard to chronologically sort memories from before you were old enough to know what "chronologically" meant. It's even harder when you aren't in school and don't have those handy grades to keep the dates straight in your mind. But if I were to venture a guess, I'd say my earliest memory was when I was two or three years old, in a Seattle preschool. I don't remember the preschool itself, really. I remember there being rows of tiny desks and a basket of oranges, but both of those details could have been completely reconstructed from reading about kids going to preschool later on. What I actually remember is this: a tire swing in front of a small wooden building surrounded by giant trees, connected to society by only a long, isolated road. I also remember swinging on that tire swing set, waiting for my mom to pick me up. But mostly it's just that image of a tire swing, gently rocking in the wind of the Pacific Northwest, in the middle of a dense copse of trees, in front of a little preschool.

As for the rest of the questions, there isn't really much of this memory to call creative non-fiction, but I don't think I'd have a problem with that label. I asked my mom, and she admits that there was a tire swing in front of my first preschool, so that much was true, although she's not sure where the "stranded in the forest" part came from. Either way, the important part of the memory, the swing set, was true, and that's good enough for me.

To a point, I agree with Joan Didion that "if you remember it, it's true." If the detail in question isn't an important factor in the point of a memory, and it just serves to better remark upon you as the rememberer (apparently that's not a word.... whatever), then sure, it's true. Obviously, making up a car accident or the death of a relative is pretty important in the shaping of a story, and at that point I wouldn't consider it non-fiction, creative or not. But in class some people didn't like that one author grouped three friends into one person for the purposes of her story and to lessen the "real-world" impact on the people mentioned, and I disagree with them. I don't think that was such a big deal, for two reasons.
1. The story isn't about her friends, it's about her. It doesn't matter who else is going through this as long as it doesn't change the circumstances of the story for the person the story is meant to be about.
2. I can empathize with the author not wanting to implicate or hurt her friends more than she has to. As a blogger, I've had to change names or sometimes even leave chunks of stories out in order to protect the people who make appearances in said stories. Telling the truth is important, but if it's at the expense of all your friends and family, then is absolute, total truth worth it? We don't all have the freedom of Frank McCourt had, waiting for his mother to die before publishing his story.