Life is real. Stories are made up.

I am not trying to recreate reality with my stories so that readers can vicariously relive the experience. Instead I think of much of the writing I do as art. Compared to painting – these stories fall in between representational and abstract works. Impressionistic, perhaps.

I start with observations of real people in real places doing real things. But then I select and shape with words, trying to express what interested me in the experience in the first place, highlighting certain elements, looking for hints about what it might mean.

I could break individual stories down for you – point out where the words describe fairly closely what happened, where I added thoughts and then bits of other experiences later. I should really reveal what I left out, which from the perspective of actual reality is almost everything. As the writer of the story, I know better than anyone how closely I have told what I experienced. Truth is another question entirely.

But to some degree, what happened is lost to me, too. The passing of time and the act of writing plays with my mind and my memories. So a story is really a new experience – one that the writer and the reader are having. The sense that you are looking in on something of life is part of it. A movie or historical novel based on true events is like that, but so are many stories that are imagined solely on the basis of fragments of the experiences of the writer or of others that are then shaped through the writer’s understanding of reality. Imagination can take humans far, but we tend to bring our selves and life as we know it along.

That’s what’s going on in my stories. You might ask what is fact and what is fiction, but don’t let those questions get in the way of wondering if the world is in some way like what I am writing and just what does that mean. Without a time machine, this book is the best way I know how to reveal to you something – whatever it was – that interested me enough to want to share it with you. If our minds connect that would be something.

For the record. Not only did I make up the family and the exchange over plugging parking meters, I believe I never told anyone not to plug the meter on a Saturday, thinking that it was Sunday. I might have done it. I might have, but I’m not sure. Does it matter very much?

I really drink egg creams at Aimee’s all the time. I could give you a thousand factual words about egg creams with my eyes closed and one hand tied behind my back. Or I could buy you one. Words aren’t everything.