Fact Checking

I had coffee with a friend who is kindly reading over a nonfiction manuscript I’m trying to peddle to editors. We talked about memories and how those are woven into the narrative. She asked: Did you really think like this as a kid. The answer is yes.

See last post on Fads

I was a slow boil, still waters run deep kind of kid. Yet, I was never AP material, though I remember one high school teacher’s amazement of how quickly I untangled and gave the straight forward translation to various parables in a book we were reading. This story is about . . . She just let me go on and on since no one else was contributing to the discussion.

But mostly I sat overwhelmed in class. I totally overthought everything. Except math/algebra. I had no idea whatsoever.

I remember going to see the movie Rocky and trying to discuss it with some kids in my class. I knew it was schlocky even then, but I also knew it was inspiring. No one was supposed to make it to the top (of the steps). Not the girlfriend, the dog, Rocky, even Sylvester Stallone. It was made on a shoestring budget with mostly no-name actors or, in the case of Burgess Meredith, a great actor but now older, filmed in Philadelphia with realistic sets—maybe not even sets, but actual locations, rundown apartments. The audacity—both of the plot and the making the movie was the point. The sequels never worked because it was about the golden moment when the impossible became possible and you can’t keep that feeling buoyed without it losing too much air and floating away.

Anyway, I might have said to these guys in my class I’d gone to see the movie. Oh, boy.

They made me know how stupid they thought the movie was and if I liked it then I must also be stupid.

A triumvirate of know–it-alls, of William F. Buckleys Jr.s, wanna-be Republicans, aspiring Heritage Foundation members. I put up with them because they were only in high school and weren’t important at the time—though all of them did go on to start magazines, hold positions of power within the American Christian church etc, but for the time being they were blowhards. Yet, I’ve always remembered this.

On one hand—who cares, on the other—I wish I’d been able to say to them at the time what was in my head. Instead, I felt like a loser.

Right now there is a lot of shouting/shutting folks down. Meant to intimidate and censure. It’s about power. And, as I wrote about in my last post: This story is still being written.