Life/Story

It was just another Friday afternoon, sitting at the high counter overlooking the stove and the espresso machine at Aimee’s. I had my egg crème, dwindling a sip at a time. I scribbled notes to myself on a Vinland Fair flyer I had picked up at the Public Library. I had boxed the words ‘life’ and ‘story’ onto the newsprint.

A boy, maybe sixteen, sat next to me, mostly just waiting for his brothers, it appeared to me, an older one and one younger. That is, they all appeared to be mostly just waiting, passing time, for reasons I had not picked up.

The middle brother asked me directly, “Life story, what’s that about?”

I usually try to answer honestly, whatever the age of my questioner. But as I had been playing with these words, the ideas they represented to me were considerably more than their face value. Still, I tried to oblige with a decent explanation in spite of the complexity of the subject – at least as it was in my mind. My explanation included a bit about a good friend in North Carolina and letters we exchanged. We were currently in the middle of something. I said that I was trying to pull apart two sides of the same coin: life being the part we experience -  the part we live – and story being the part where we tell about it or give explanations for what the living is. At the same time it is all of a whole. The stories are our lives.

I muddled the explanation – and was aware that I was muddling it – but I had been and still was working to figure out the story part and the life part – and here again found myself in the middle where both were happening at the same time.

The middle brother looked at me after some of my attempts and asked, “Aren’t you making it too complicated?” His older brother, nearby, who must at least have been partially listening in, chided him for being so frank. But in a way, my questioner was right. But what I told him as something of an answer was that what I was doing - was part of a process where in a sense I worked my way up through complications so that I could come through to the other side with something simpler.

“You’ll get there,” he promised confidently, although I think he was too young to know how right he might well be.

T. S. Eliot apparently once said that genuine poetry can be communicated before it is understood. I think that makes sense more broadly as well.

Bailie, the young woman doing her job making grilled cheese sandwiches and such, had also overheard some of our conversation. At the same time she had been fiddling with the radio on the other side of me, trying to help the youngest brother to get a station to come in, but with little luck.

Eventually the brother’s time had expired and they were finally leaving, and then the youngest stepped back inside the front door and said, “Bye, weird-looking lady,” to Bailie and walked right back out again.

Bailie exclaimed something, and I, not having heard everything, said something about her being called a lady at her age.

She clarified that it was more about the ‘weird-looking’ part – and that he was seven, after all. Somehow that led to a continuation of my life and story conundrum. Essentially, I told Bailie, the kid was telling a story that was in his mind about his experience with her. It came out in his words as ‘weird-looking lady,’ but then as Bailie had interpreted it, she recognized that people sometimes said the opposite of what they meant.

Young people around me were making sense left and right. And of course, it is obvious that I am now trying to make my own sense out of what was a raw, unfiltered, unedited series of conversations and events. This is how life and story work together. The complications are woven into the fabric of it all and truth will not be pulled out as a single thread. And yet we go on telling our stories as if we are doing that very thing.

With few customer demands on her attention, Bailie confirmed that I was the author of the book Aimee’s manager had put a copy of on the front counter. He had been selling a few, here and there.

I pulled a page of poetry out of the folder I had been carrying and offered  it to Bailie as an example of what I was working on, what I was trying to get to with my thinking about life and story.

She stopped and read my poem ‘Appearances’ – a coincidence - but a fitting poem about a man not quite seeing things as they are as he watches a women walking down the sidewalk across the street. When she finished, she looked up at me where I sat. Can I imagine that there was affirmation and a question in her glance at the same time?

I was there that afternoon, and I can’t completely tell you what people said or did. Whatever happened and the stories people told each other is past. And now it all echoes only in this remaining fragment of a story.

Maybe parts of it still drift in the memories of the brothers or of Bailie – or the other characters that wandered through Aimee’s that afternoon that I never mentioned.

Bailie was joking with the guy who had put ice cubes in his tomato soup to cool it down as I walked out. Without stories, it’s all just soup.

From 'Little Bird'