Imagination Running Away

It was just my imagination,

Running away with me

The Temptations

I don't remember the story.  I only recall that after I presented it to my first grade classmates, the teacher called my mother to school, informed her with pedagogical certainty that I had 'vivid imagination', too vivid, and the two of them ordered me to chill, not using the word of course, as it all happened long before 'to chill' were to mean 'to shut up'.   Whether I did shut up or not I don't remember either, probably not, though the experience must have been enough to stop me on the road to becoming another Stephen King.    The story itself probably had something to do with vampires, which were part of everyday folklore of those days due to the circumstances surrounding us, ruined abandoned buildings with transients living in them, though to a seven year old raised on Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales and Disney cartoons, vampires were nothing more than bad people.

I continued to make up outlandish stories, and recount them to friends and strangers, more as jokes than ambitious literary exercises.  Some of them got away from me (the stories, not the friends and strangers!) and ended up as widely spread rumours and urban legends, which wasn't my intention, most of the time anyway.  Imagine when a rumour you yourself started gets back to you in a large metropolis.  It's happened.

More recently, with the Internet, and amusing things happening in the world every day,  I've been in my element like a fish in the water, inventing tales and passing them on to newer friends and strangers.

I've found that inventing and  including one's cousins in such stories helps to increase and assure their credibility.  The more detail about this cousin the better for the rest of the story however unbelievable the core of it sounds. During some presidential scandal, for example,  I invented a cousin working  in the Presidential Executive Office, the building which stands next to the White House, who I said was feeding me juicy information,  saying that the President was considering resigning from office.  The fish, my audience,  swallowed the bait and the story caught on.

Since then, I have acquired cousins on Wall Street, among the Oscar Selection Committee and in other places of power.   In reality, my immediate family (parents) has been particularly poor on cousins, effects of war and the global movement of peoples, and the only cousins I do have are distant, ordinary, boring even, except for one woman who's been a source of intrigue, poisonous rumours, all of it motivated by envy or greed, I'm not really sure, and much of it unfortunately quite effective.  But that's a story for another evening. My own  children anyway are much luckier with numerous cousins from their mother's side.

Did I give away (reveal)  too much?