Little Miss Pants on Fire

Midway through, I thought I'd have it figured out. Not the ending, but what the beginning meant. This is why we are all obsessed with memory and invoke meaning where we think it should go. Although we also all know history has a voice of its own. Capital T, Truth is irrelevant. The moral is in the outcome, not the story itself. Most of my real memories I have put under lock and key deep in the dark corridors of my experiential mind. Safe keeping. My own and others safety.

So some do inevitably morph into secrets and some are tempted to sneak out. Needless to say, I don't like digging around for the right one. It's messy in there.

When asked to conjure up my first memory ever, I responded as anyone would to the request as though being asked to clean someone else's latrine. 

But I found it. For now, it's the first ever.

My first visceral memory is of being called a liar. Not just labeled a ‘liar’, but awarded for being the best one. A ribbon fashioned from construction paper made with two notched out blue bookmarks that formed a vee, a circle glued over their intersection point notating the number one was bestowed upon me in front of my elementary peers one day in Mrs. A’s class.

When I brought it home from school my grandparents giggled at my grand achievement, a little too much. Telling and showing whomever they could, including the mailman, who, like me, didn't seem to think it was as funny as they did.

I was 5 and in first grade at Loyola Elementary, a richy-rich school, although I had an inter-district transfer. I knew there was much about adult humor I had to learn. I did not ever end up learning it in school, however. I was not proud of my ribbon, but they were and proudly put it on the left side of the Frigidaire affixed with an old AAA fridge magnet. 

I thought I should be punished, I half expected it. As far as I had learned in my handful of years so far, lying was a sign of weakness, either used to protect me or make someone seem stronger than they were.

Even now I do not disagree with that definition, especially after having been divorced for some time from a compulsive liar, I have the accumulated a physical BS ton by volume amount of experience with lies, white and tall. 

I remember that handmade ribbon vividly with its bold royal blue bands and happy orange circle. It defined me, made me, made me look more alertly for lies, question what is good and what is bad, and helped me to discover ribbons of my own truth somewhere in the middle. Now I understand why I needed to remember this misremembered memory, hindsight provides clearer vision. I am learning to embrace my little Liar after receiving an award for #1 Storyteller in the first grade. I’ve figured out that the ending will write itself. 

Image of painting by Ludwig Koch (painter) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, c. 1918.