Eleven Memories: Nine

I've often wondered why adults lie to little kids. Not malicious lies, but lies about how the world works. Lies about the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny?  I think because when they do, they make the world magical for them as well as for their children. With a lie, they can make the boring and slightly tawdry, shiny and worthwhile. They can make it a story.

When you're a kid, everything adults tell you is true. It doesn't matter if they tell you that an ethereal woman obsessed with your teeth breaks in to your house at night to give you money, or that a fat man in a red lounge suit is capable of smashing the laws of physics to bits once a year, you're going to believe them. At least on some level. At least for a little while. 

So when Papa told me that he had used the sword above the fireplace in the First World War, I believed him.

I believed him so much, that I told all the kids at school about my Grandfather's awesome sword.  I built on the lie. I told them how he'd probably fought loads of battles with it in the war and about how he was probably secretly a knight but just didn't want to admit it. Because all knights have swords, right? 

To their credit, none of them believed me.

I explained to him, years later, how his lie had made me the laughing stock of my class (for all of two days, until one of the girls on the playground hung upside down on the monkey bars and revealed her underpants to the entire school -  the story of the sword couldn't compete with a scandal of that magnitude). 

He just shrugged and laughed, but it's something that I think about a lot.

The truth of the sword is that it's probably made of tin and can't cut through butter. But that's boring. Why would you hang a sword like that over your fireplace? Why would you spend money on it in the first place? The story Papa told me put that sword on a level with Excalibur. Made it worthy of being in the house, a focal point. At least for me. And maybe that was the point.

All stories are lies, especially the good ones.