FOREVER ADDICTING: July 2009

In grade school, I vividly remember the annual Remembrance Day assembly; sitting in the crowded and musty auditorium, passing around envelopes stuffed full of poppies, and standing for an unbearable moment of silence. I didn’t quite understand what I was supposed to “remember” on this day nor did my teachers tell me who exactly was “Lest” and why we “mustn’t forget”. So, instead, I did as I was told and respectfully listened to the veteran’s stories as I fiddled with my poppy.

The veterans who spoke – retired wrinkly grandpas who were once strong and young - painted a story of war for me. Every year on Remembrance Day, their recollections became my knowledge yet I can’t help but wonder if their stories were accurate. Curious, I speculate, did they purposely censor the horrific gangrene and bloody corpses for us children or did they themselves simply become censored over the many years? I struggle for an absolute truth and question; do their stories really give us, the wide-eyed audience, something truthful to remember?

My father always told me that an accurate story derives from the absolute truth; however, I’ve come to realize that in story telling – like gossip, flooding into the schoolyard – an absolute truth constantly suffers from distortion every time someone tells or retells his or her own version. It is difficult to trust people’s accounts of things when the details are fabricated or forgotten.

It amazed me how the veterans always recalled enough information to fill a twenty or even thirty-minute speech. Their speeches were often coated with Boy Scout bravery and Hardy Boy adventure; entertaining the audience – as if a performer - with onomatopoeia booms and pow-pows! I recall applauding so fast that my little palms burned, as if I had just witnessed a theatrical production with funny looking bagpipes, surrounded by a decor of plastic red poppies.

It seems obvious to me now that the veteran’s struggled to separate the “what had happened” - world war two events - from the “what was happening” - speaking on stage, which made it difficult to tell an absolute true story, complete and unmodified from script.

Perhaps the veterans who spoke at my school told their story as best they could, or wrote their story for how they wanted to tell it, or simply improvised little details due to their on-stage excitement. Or maybe now, looking back, I just don’t believe them.

I think of what it means for an absolute truth to exist. As a child, naïve and eternally hopeful, believing was free of cold hard facts, scientific proof, and statistical data. As a child, what my father told me and what I discovered on my own was absolute truth enough.

Now, twenty-odd years old, I continue to struggle with the meaning of an absolute truth. In a world of 3D advertisements, hectic traffic lights, customized coffee, and ever changing knowledge, we are constantly changing, improving, and, yes, questioning. In the face of love, money, and our society, I question the evolving meanings in its venerable state of truthfulness.

Reminiscing the stuffy auditorium, wrinkly veterans, and manila envelops, I contemplate if my recollections of the Remembrance Day assembly’s are warped due to my own growth and maturity. I sit here, struggling to grasp an absolute truth - if any – of both the teller and tale itself as if I were fiddling with my stubborn poppy, falling off my sweater and pricking my thumb.