Thanks for What Memories?

If I could only find the card

Ernest Borgnine died yesterday. This is mostly what I remember of him:

• PT-73 and the endless reruns of McHale's Navy on the old green-box television in our family den;
  
• That my mother couldn't stand him, who knows why. My mother had her opinions. Not to mention a particular expression she would use whenever EB's name was mentioned;
• The huge disappointment of his being Grand Marshal of the Rose Parade one of the New Year's mornings I stood on the sidewalks of Pasadena to watch those amazing flower-covered floats, the silver-bedecked horses, the glitzy celebrities waving their tight little circles as they passed by. Ernest Borgnine, really? I stood out in the cold for him?

Except for this: Ernest Borgnine never was the Grand Marshal of the Rose Parade. Another of my memory's cats sacrificed this day on the altar of curiosity when I headed over to The Googles to tag a particular year to my Borgnine memory (60s? 70s?). 1n 1965 Arnold Palmer wore the sash. Ditto Billy Graham, 1971. Lawrence Welk, a one an' a 1972. But no EB (insert a particular expression here).

It's not hard to imagine how any one of the others I've listed might have led to letdown in this girl's eager heart. Still, Ernest Borgnine failing me at the Rose Parade seems like such an unlikely and specific stand-in for disappointment that it makes me a little itchy, not knowing what that's all about. I could squander away my day, of course, and do some more googling. Or set it aside and accept the tangled-coat-hanger mess of my memory. Or I could just fill the gap by making up another story altogether. Isn't that, really, what a writer's supposed to do?

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