Between Memory and Reality

Craig Davidson tries to flesh out what of his memories from his youth are real, and what are imagined.  It touches on the shaping of memory with storytelling as he tries to reconstruct what happened at the amusement park he worked at, which is now embroiled in scandal.  His story involved disposing of a dead sea lion:

Matt grabbed one flipper, I the other. The creature possessed the disobliging weight of all dead things—but it was wet, its hide naturally oily, so it glided rather easily across the floor, up a cement ramp, and into the freezer, where we left it among the pallets of frozen fish.
Near the end of our shift, we returned to the freezer and stood around the animal, our breath puffing whitely. It was now encased in ice—the lacy, wafer-thin kind that forms like a crackling skin over winter puddles and shatters under the slightest pressure—and frozen to the smooth concrete. We pushed and shouldered it. No luck. In extremis, Rod put the boots to it, kicking until it came unstuck.
Matt and I laughed—a shameful admission. You know those hysterical giggles you get when a situation is so absurd, shocking, or terrifying that they’re more a form of damage control? The laughter boils up your throat with a fizzy club soda effervescence, impossible to tamp down, intent on releasing the poison inside you.
I truly want to believe that’s what it was. Otherwise, it was just two cruel boys laughing as our supervisor kicked a dead sea lion in the head.
The ice splintered. The sea lion spun on its axis like a compass needle seeking true north. We guided it from the freezer, its body skidding awkwardly down the ramp and onto a concrete platform set above the Barn’s floor. Rod backed up Big Blue, an ancient stake truck retrofitted as a trash hauler, until its bumper nearly touched the platform. Then we slid the sea lion into the bed.

He met with his old friend, to compare whether his friend's memory matched up to his.  His friend remembered how the author got covered in shit from the dead animal as they tried to pry it out of there.  That was a detail the author always left out when recounting the event.

The difference between our narrative of events and the actual event has always intrigued me.