stories
I would love to spend my life telling stories. It's one of the oldest and most distinctly human things we do. My favorite part of family dinners are the snippets of oral history. The older generation tells stories that are glimpses into different worlds. My parents tell stories about the west, about when they were fantastically young. They took me, as a two year old, backpacking in Utah. The talk about how I trundled down Coyote Wash - which is only a few inches deep but twenty feet wide - carrying Mr. Bluebird and a teapot. I would ride in a backpack, and would reach around and suffocate my carrier with kisses as we hiked. When my parents tell the stories, I can almost smell the spring desert. A mix of pungent wet sage, blossoms, and seventy degree weather (the kind of weather where you can't tell where your skin stops and the air begins).
They're stories that I know by heart, that I recite almost without thinking. My friend James can vouch for this - I realized the other day that I keep telling him stories about our family's green chevy and at this point he knows them by heart. Whoops. (The chevy had mice in the carbuerator, and broke down on the way to a little league soft ball game. It was a regular adventure in suburbia, with my father fishing out the nest of translucent baby mice and laying them in the back of the truck. I couldn't ever bring myself to look at the mice head on, but I knew they were see through.)
I would love to tell stories someday. I would love even more to tell stories that had a point.
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I'm sitting next to the window, and the cold air is making my travel-tired eyes feel strange. Sometimes entering this room is how I imagine it is to enter the land of the lotus-eaters. I'm in that moment before I've completely forgotten, but my memory of the journey I was so revved up about is fading. This room makes me content, with its low afternoon sunlight and scentless air. The cold air has almost washed all of the cramped fatigue of travel out of my eyes. I feel good here because I also feel forgetful.
There are things I want to do with my life. I suppose I don't need to lecture you how fleeting this life will be, but damn, sometimes I want to do things that ages to come will remark upon. I want to be remarkable, I want to do things that will last longer than my body. I want to be sterling. I don't want to be forgotten. I want to do something, make something, write something, contribute something greater than myself.
I spend a fair amount of energy suppressing the acknowledgement of that ambition. These are scary things even to write here, because I know the real likelihood of what will happen to my legacy. When I'm in this room, I don't have the time to sit down and think about this. I'm running from class to lunch to the prescribed rest time (even that feels rushed!) and I'm so content and I'm so happy and I love the people and things are so good. And so I forget, I eat the lotus. It is funny, though, that the times I'm at leisure are the times I remember these ambitions. (Because reason would suggest otherwise, if we're going with this lotus analogy. At the same time, it's only when I'm at leisure that I'm able to think about things like this instead of living hand to mouth.)
There are things I want to do with my life. Most of all, I want to make sure I don't just spend my life reading how other people did things with their lives. I know this probably won't happen, but I worry about it anyway. This is a sojourn on the way to something else, and well, that's the part that I forget sometimes - that there's something else.
2000-11-30, stories
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