Why is it so easy to tell a friend a story, the story say of being seventeen and driving to meet a guy, late for your first date, when into the road jumped a flashing orange stick and your heart slammed into your chest because it didn't make sense until you realized the stick was attached to a man, and the man was signaling with the orange stick to drive into a parking lot where a policeman was waiting to give you a ticket for driving 20 mph over the speed limit. Of course, you said you didn't realize you were driving that fast, and now it's been so long that you can't remember if you really didn't or you actually did but just said you didn't, though that detail is so unimportant, it doesn't even come into the telling of the story to your friend. You do tell how you were so scared, you cried. Instead of the $250 ticket, the policeman offered you, as a first offender, the option of taking a defensive driving class for $75. It was summer and the class was held downtown and so you cooked up a lie to tell your parents, that you were going to go golfing with that guy, the same one you were going to meet the night you got the speeding ticket, the guy who had since become your boyfriend. (Your friend interrupts the story to laugh at the absurdity of the lie.) But oh how you would have rather been golfing on a beautiful summer's day, instead of sitting in a bland windowless room in downtown Omaha with a lot of stale looking adults, watching films of fatal car accidents. Mostly, you were worried about running into your dad who worked downtown, so you skipped lunch and ate a candy bar out of the vending machine. And when you got home and your mom asked you how was golfing, you said "great" in that same bored way you answered most every question she asked, so she didn't suspect a thing.
Why is a story like this so easy to tell, rolling out of your memory onto your tongue, but when you go to write it down, the story slithers away and in its place arises all kinds of diversions and abstractions, that in the breathless moment of creation appear pithy and interesting, but in the reality of the reader's mind are dizzying and incomprehensible at best?
I'd rather watch car accidents than golf. It goes back to my few feeble attempts on the links. It is not a long story, but too hard to write down, so it must keep living in memory (if you can call that living, or maybe just waiting to come back alive along with a host of other life embarrassments).
ReplyDeleteGrandpa john
Well then, next time you are in town, we will have to get you out on the links just so we can conjure up some good stories. Did you know that your son owns a set of clubs? Yes, and he even has a pair of those tasseled shoes. Must be a trait inherited from the other side of the family. I realize you are not to blame for this one.
DeleteAs I remember it, I was in the car with you when you got the ticket.
ReplyDeleteI love your blog. I'm reading Bernadette and Bigsley as a pithy allegory of the ongoing conflict in Syria, but I may be mistaken.
"That Guy" from story
Oh Dear, what a surprise! If you were in the car with me, then I must not have been rushing to my first date with you which begs several questions: Does my memory fail me? (Highly likely.) Does your memory fail you? (I have no idea how likely or unlikely that is.) Am I who you think I am? Are you who you think you are? Were there multiple speeding tickets issued on multiple evenings of speeding off to what I remember as being first dates?? Regardless, thank you for reading anything I write as a "pithy allegory." That makes me sound much smarter than I really am which makes my parents happy. And thank you for giving me a lot to write about. Those were indeed funny days.
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