stories

My first writing class was today. I had half an hour between work/dinner and class, so I walked around campus. Not too many people around in the evening, so I could capture all the wide open spaces as an unabashed tourist. I think the continuous sunshine has gotten to me lately. I love it of course, but is it strange to say that sometimes it depresses me a little? There’s no sense of change, and I so easily slip into identifying with my surroundings that I also begin to feel like I’m the same, yesterday and tomorrow. I told Andrew about it and he said that it was thundering in Virginia, and I thought that was nice. It also reminded me of War of the Worlds, which I had just seen, when all that lightning was coming down and Tom Cruise asks, “Where’s the thunder?” But anyway, tonight the warmth and light felt more malleable, more like home, more spacious.

We spent most of class telling and listening to stories. We had to tell a neighbor a story and later introduce our neighbor to the rest of the class by summarizing the story. A common icebreaker, but this one was memorable for a few reasons. We spent a really long time talking, and people remembered and told the stories in great detail. And since it’s a continuing studies course, I’m by far the youngest in the class. There are two other post-grad students who are several years older, then the bulk of the class spans the thirties-sixties range. Older people seem more frank, and free-flowing, and willing to share. Unlike those awkward first sections in college, where everyone harbors some degree of anxiety about speaking up, these people talk and talk, comfortably and without reserve. And the most striking thing was that as adults…they had adult stories, like wars and marriage and business ventures and grandchildren and real true successes and failures.

I thought about the cancer patients I met last week, and about how what I loved and remembered most about that was hearing about what they did. Steph asked me what kind of cancers they had, and I blanked because the first thing that registered in my mind were their faces and their stories. I thought: music store owner and guitar player (from heavy metal to country, he said with a matter-of-fact smile), world RV-traveler (he lived out of one with his wife and their last trip was a month in Alaska), a family sports bar owner with tattoos of the American flag down his arms as a remembrance of his time as a Marine and in Vietnam (and who sought physical therapy advice from a former Miss America), and probably the one that touched me most deeply, an elderly Korean man (retired from running a supermarket with his wife) who reminded me so much of my dad. He didn’t speak much English and tried to compensate by smiling often, and he was so genuinely huggable. Anyway, all of that made me think again that I want to work with older people, because there is something so poignant about that time in your life, with all those experiences behind you.

I heard twenty-four other stories, and left with so many sad, amusing, bittersweet, complicated images. One man got out of mandatory military training by bribing his instructors, and he and his friends would hole themselves up in the tanks they were supposed to be learning to drive to play cards. “It was the best place in the world to play cards; it was so quiet.” I can’t get that line out of my head. That was my favorite story (it went on about how he had no idea how to actually drive a tank during boot camp because he’d spent the three years of training playing cards, and more after that, but that beginning part was the best). Another man described being in the middle of the ocean and being entirely alone in every direction. One woman hopped on a train for a day-trip to Paris and had a movie-scene experience of twenty gorgeous men packed in her train cabin filling the air with their cigarette smoke. Another woman talked about the smell of India when she returned to her home after two years in the States, familiar and new. While I had tried to find just one incident, the stories of a lot of people felt like the stories of their entire lives. A woman talked about her conflicting responsibilities as daughter, wife, and mother and how all the important people in her life were in different cities and she had no idea where she should be, literally. Those stories gave a certain sense of weight and lightness at once. I can recognize the ease of past, and foresee the difficulty of future.

My story was a trivial one. I told my neighbor the story about how my brother caused the death of my favorite mouse. I told him that being the baby of the family, and the only girl and the one people were supposed to protect, I’d always wanted to take care of things and this translated into having a string of pets when I was a kid, including countless mice. I wasn’t very good at taking care of things, and I’m still not (this worries me often), and they kept dying. The first one was sick when I got it, so it wasn’t my fault, and I don’t recall if the others were my fault or not, but without any facts, I sense that they were. This one mouse I had was brown and white, with a spotted face and brown spots on its tail. All the other mice were white and I swear they discriminated against her, and she was always fighting on her own against the two or three others. So naturally I aligned myself with her, and her vulnerability. I told my neighbor about how my brother and I always fought as kids, and how one day he put my mice cage outside in the summer heat, and how by the time I found them, one had died and my brown one was near-death and how I tried to revive her with water and how she woke up but died an hour or so later. I said that I knew my brother had done it but I never talked to him about it or asked why. I can’t remember if he was mad at me for some reason, I don’t think so, but it could have been general spite—or maybe it was unintentional or just forgetful or whatever. There are a million more important things that he and I never discuss, but for some reason that incident feels emblematic of the silence between us.

Anyway, after my neighbor relayed my story to the class, the woman behind me says to me, “You should read Julie Orringer’s ‘How to Breathe Underwater.’” I can’t quite describe how that made me feel. It wasn’t a happy, or an excited, or even surprise. Not only is that one of my favorite favorite books, but I knew exactly which story in the collection she was talking about. And I’d thought of my brother and my mouse story when I’d first read it a couple of years ago. I loved it so much that I made Richard read it. When you find something really truly worthy of love, you want to share it. It’s that desire to connect stories that’s the never-ending source of my happiness and my weakness, that way of always saying “That reminds me of…” And this woman echoed it. The feeling I had was somewhat like one of things being right, that the way I am is meant to be, and that the way people are is just, the way people are and it’s supposed to be that way.

One of my teacher’s goals is to “encourage anti-social behavior.” When he said that a lot of people in the class thought he implied hostility, but I knew what he actually meant because I’m already like that. He said that the world is noisy and it’s important to be by yourself and quiet it down on your own. I see how this would be conducive to writing. But I don’t think it’s possible for me to be any more introverted than I already am. I mean, all day I considered not going to the class at all—avoid the new faces and new situation and instead go home, sit in my room, and listen to music while I arrange photos into albums that I’ll likely show three people in my life. I want to write to connect, not to isolate. I’m naturally quiet and I naturally find quiet. I don’t want to subdue the noise, I want to mold it into a communicable shape and give it away in a way that makes it louder to you and to me too.