How to tell a story

Dear Imaginary Reader, 

I have not, loured around these pages for some time. Procrastination, some.  Mostly, gainful employment. It gets in the way of leisure and writing. But I have had some top-notch encouragement lately; one person has told me to open the faucets and write like hell. And so I have. 

I've been struggling to try to tell a story; in part because I tell stories every day, and my students all tell me to write a book. Every year, more students tell me this, but I don't know where to begin. So I began this way. What comes next is the beginning, or the middle, or maybe the end. 

BEGIN

When you tell a story, the hardest part is always where to begin. Do you begin with background? My lousy childhood, as Holden Caulfield would say, or in my younger and more vulnerable days as per  Nick Carraway. But I am not a great writer of the canon; I am only a high school English teacher. And my story is not one for the ages, it is one for a particular Age; because that age has passed.  Many of the people in my story have died, or moved; the old places have burned down, been vacated, neglected, deteriorated, fallen back into the land. Or worse:  the old rough log houses and trailer homesteads and wild places we lived have been upgraded, modernized,  paved over by progress and turned into a quaint nostalgia of What It Was Like, a museum piece of life that falls so far short of really, what it was like. 

 Starting is such sweet sorrow, because there are so many stories to tell that you don't know which one should go first. There are so few of us left of that time. I will try to be their bard. 

So the best place to start is here, now: August, 2018,  staring off into space, typing. Trying to recall memories, timelines, who-did-what-when. But at this point, after 20-some years have passed, these memories are less linear; they are images, triggered by a feeling or a glimpse of an old Subaru or a Queen Anne’s Lace or smoke from a campfire. Now we see through a glass darkly, but then, we saw face to face.

DEPARTURE

I’d never really read Thoreau, not in great detail. I didn’t know about living deliberately. Life can be a series of apathetic decisions that lead you somewhere. I had a relatively passive childhood. Leaving that behind was an act of open rebellion, a rejection of the suburban dream my parents had worked so hard to provide. 

My parents met in college, at the University of Toronto. He was an only child of Irish immigrants, from Bay Ridge Brooklyn. She was a middle child of eight from Rochester NY. There are all kinds of photos of them in their youth: in phone booths, with lampshades on their heads, chugging from champagne bottles, sleeping in the backseat of someone’s car - a coupe, or a roadster. They were right out of Mad Men, down to the Manhattans every night and overflowing ashtrays every morning. So being young, Irish, Catholic- of course they had lots of children – 6 of us- and one died.

In our suburban rabbit warren, many fiefdoms had lost princes or princesses to illness or accidents- one of our neighbors loses a little girl when she has a reaction to anesthesia during minor surgery. My first adolescent boyfriend gets leukemia and dies. Another family loses a son when the parents have a terrible car accident on vacation in Colorado- the car tumbling over an embankment, killing the baby, and injuring the other boys while the Great Divide looks on unaffected. These occurrences were sad and unexpected, but not uncommon.  Life was more of a crapshoot in those days.

When my sister dies- at home, on the sofa, with a priest, a doctor and all the family there- it is sad, but, I think, not a surprise. Doctors have been telling my parents for years that my sister is dying, but I suppose at some level, they didn’t believe them. As devout and faithful Catholics, perhaps they believed  there was going to be a Divine Intervention or a miracle. As intelligent and educated people, they believed in Science as well. My mother followed things to the letter; respiratory therapy, medications, checkups. And despite the best efforts of scheduling and routine, of prayer and medicine, my sister dies at an age when she should be blossoming. It’s a cold March day, iron-grey clouds shingling the sky, bitter winds from all directions. I feel like I should be on the deathbed watch, but I need space, I need to breathe. I go out for a drive with a friend. I can go back and take care of the detritus afterwards. I am gone for thirty minutes. While I am gone, my sister dies. 

 There is a wake. My parents sit in padded metal chairs for six hours and don’t talk, so I do: Shake hands, so good of you for coming, maybe a hug, a smile, no tears. My parents are zombies with blank eyes.   I conjure images of Jackie Kennedy to keep myself composed during the funeral. My parents look at me and I see a nest of baby birds: helpless, featherless, flightless. 

I am 19 years old. I just want to work my dead-end job, live in my apartment, have a boyfriend, go out and get drunk on weekends like everyone else. I am working full time in a nursing home. I love the old people. I know they’re going to die, they know they’re going to die, sometimes they don’t know where they are, even, but at least we’re all on the same page here. Sometimes I sit with the dying patients to atone for leaving my sister. I clean the bodies of the dead, I wash and smooth and wrap them and take them to the morgue. Everything in its place. I am not afraid of death. I am afraid of life, of life here in the suburbs.

Two years later, when I meet the guy that I’ll marry and have four children with, I jump at the chance to get as far away from here as possible. He’s a fun guy- buys food for the apartment, brings wine,  cooks for us, fixes my car. He writes letters from his job: three or four a week. He calls when he can: sweet words over static lines. I go visit. It’s October; the aspen is golden around the silty green glacier-fed lakes; the sun is warm and the skies are crisp and clear. I see the aurora borealis for the first time, ribboning sheets of green and golden in the skies, waves of stardust all around. I walk on glacier rocks, I shoot a gun for the first time. I feel strong and safe. There are no nests of baby birds with their mouths open, no pitying stares, no sainthood halo. There is wool and leather, cold and rock and dirt, metal and fish and game and woodfires. I can be myself here.  I can be here.  

By the following May, I have packed my clothes and am leaving. My friends from college come to stage an intervention. How well do you know this guy? Alaska is awfully far away. Yes, I think. Almost far enough. 

So this is the beginning of my story.  Everyone else enters in the next chapter. 

I'm trying to be as truthful as I can, and I don't know how this sounds.  Most of the people I will tell 

about are dead; some moved away; some flit between warm and cold climes. It's hard to tell a story 

like this, because it's my story and I have to share it with you, whoever you are. I don't want to bore

you, or worse, exaggerate or lie. 

I don't want to break my arm patting myself on the back, as we used to say. 

This is not just my story. It is Alaska's story, too. 

(1263) 

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant

Emily Dickinson

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —