Don't ruin a story for lack of embellishment

I've always thought of my dad as the answer man, the holder of all truths. When I was a kid I would inundate him with questions everywhere we went - and he always had an answer...and not just a canned or obviously fabricated answer, a legit one. He's a straight shooter, on whom you could count on for a no-nonsense anything. This was a sharp contrast to my mother, who, how do I say it, invented the hyperbole? I'm a pretty literal person, so I struggled sometimes not to call her out on her level of exaggeration, especially when I was around for the actual event that she was exaggerating about, and I would stand there thinking, "that wasn't what happened...." but somewhere along the way they seem to have rubbed off on one another, and I can no longer discern what is truth, and what is fabrication. And worse? They passed it on. I've found myself repeating stories or "facts" that they've told me and it is, quite frankly, whittling away my credibility.

My dad once told me that a bus-load of children on their way to a school event were buried in the Hope landslide. Years later, as my best friend and I were driving through Hope, BC, I shared this tidbit of information, passed on from the guru of information, my father. I even convinced her to stop at the landslide look-out point, so she could see the gravity of its devastation, as she had never heard of this slide. So there we are, standing at the look-out point, and I'm recounting the tearful story that my dad had told me as a child, and my friend is listening, but she's also concentrating on the info plaque that is in front of us.

"Bus-load of children, hey?" she says to me. "Because this plaque here says that four people were killed. And it doesn't sound like any of them were children."

In my dad's (and my own) defense, it was a devastating landslide, the biggest in Canada, in fact. This doesn't let him off the hook for giving me false information, though. Oh no, he ruined my random-fact-credibility factor, and I haven't let him live this down. We refer to the incident almost weekly in our household, using the phrase, "bus-load of children" as a sort of accusation to highlight any suspicion of exaggeration or inaccuracy.

I am now very careful to research any and all "facts" that my parents tell me before I pass them on.