It seems that I’m making history.
The other day a relative e-mailed me some information she had dug up in “Google” about my family. Among other things, the article said that my mother had two sisters-in-law, named Edna and Paula. Edna and Paula are the names that I assigned to my two aunts, in my book, “Mother and Me.” Their names weren’t Edna and Paula. As I explained in the “Author’s Note” at the beginning of the book, I assigned fictitious names to some of the characters, since I could not rely on my sixty-plus-year-old memory to treat them fairly and didn’t want to embarrass anyone. Apparently the author of the article did not bother to read that disclaimer, and my two aunts will go down in history under assumed names.
Then there is the matter of my father. Those of you who read “Mother and Me” may recall an incident along the road from Warsaw where we encounter a Polish military convoy with a broken-down truck and a young lieutenant who wants to commandeer ours. To stop him from doing that, my mother tells him a big fib about the truck belonging to my father and about my father being a senator. I believe that I made it quite clear in the book that this is one of the fibs that my mother would use to solve problems and which drove me crazy. But, apparently, the fib fooled not only the young lieutenant, but the author of the “Google” article as well. My father, who had been a businessman in the textile business, is now duly ensconced in the annals of Polish history as a senator.
I can’t help wondering how accurate the rest of the supposedly authoritative articles on the Internet really are.