'The boys were great jokers' says my mother 'They were always up to something.' This was desirable in boys: to be great jokers, to always up to something. My mother adds a key sentence: 'We had a lot of fun'.
Having fun had always been high on my mother's agenda. She had as much fun as possible, but what she means by this phrase cannot be understood without making an adjustment, an allowance, for the great gulf across which this phrase must travel before it reaches us. It comes from another world, which like the stars that originally sent out the light we see hesitating in the sky above us these nights, may be, or is already gone. It is possible to reconstruct the facts of this world-the furniture, the clothing, the ornaments on the mantle piece, the jugs and basins and even the chamber pots in the bedrooms, but not the emotions, not with the same exactness. So much that is now known and felt must be excluded.'
Margaret Atwood being precise about memory and recollection in her short short story 'Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother' from her 1983 collection 'Bluebeard's Egg', a book I would commend.
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