Real stories.
I love this post that I read this morning, about writing and telling real stories. The author quotes Buffering quoting Sonny Payne, who tells a short little story about his time in High school as a percussionist. 105 words tells a succinct juicy little story that evokes a great memory and draws us into Sonny’s world even for a second. But it also acted as a vehicle to my past allowing me to reminisce and remember my days in the jazz band. But I love the point of Merlin Mann’s post, which is to write real stories.
Please use that keyboard to talk about your life sometimes.
Your real life. Not just the canned version of life on which we slap adhesive labels like happy or sad, poor or rich, employed or unemployed, “eating lunch” or “hatin’ life”, “it’s complicated” or “serial entrepreneur,” “meh” or “whatever.”
Tear off your f**king labels.
Pontiac.
Tell me something that happened. Use the names of people you’d forgotten about, and say what you’d thought would happen but didn’t. Write down what part of the song was playing when you slammed the door only to realize you had to go back inside for your car keys. Can you remember when you were still little enough to hide under the kitchen sink where it smelled like ammonia and Comet and old sponges? What was the color of the clunky old car your Dad would let you help steer. What brand did he smoke?”
My Dad smoked Winstons, from a red and gold pack that never seemed to empty. Lots and lots of Winstons. And, I loved when my Dad would let me help steer the vomit-green Pontiac with the plastic seats down the maniac curves of Boomer Road. I’d sit on his lap in this giant, ridiculous automobile, with cigarette smoke swirling around our heads and out the cracked window, listening to a Reds game on WLW, laughing and steering.
My Dad had the same name as me and he never should have smoked as much as he did. And, I swear to God, thirty-five years later, I can still see his big hands on the wheel, and still smell those Winstons, and still hear Joe Nuxhall’s call, as Pete Rose stretches another double into an impossible head-first triple, and as I type this, I’m just remembering that whenever we were pulling out of my Grandparents’ driveway, my Dad would always flip the vomit-green Pontiac’s lights on and off three times. Blink. Blink. Blink.
That’s how we said goodbye.
I love that.
Our dad had a slew of Nissan Sunny’s during my childhood, old boxy cars, a yellow one, followed by a red one with patches of other colours and then a white wagon which I loved to crawl and climb all over. I loved the feel of the cheap fabric seat covers, the warm plushness of it as little fingers sank into them. One warm summer day Dad was cleaning and vacuuming one of these cars I climbed into the drivers seat and being the great driver that I was, at the tender age of under 5, I started to pull all the levers and push as many of the buttons as I could. I think I got to the hazard lights before my father found out and was subsequently smacked.
I never did that again.
Hmmmmm. And now I have an urge to write some jest about how that might have thus emotionally scarred me so much that I failed my drivers test three times, and now have a subsequent fear of pushing all the buttons in my car lest some form of physical punishment happen… but I would be lying. And it would lose the poignoncy of the memory, reducing it to some cheap joke. Because its not about the fact that I got smacked, or that I was a curious child, but its about the fact that this actually happened. And I think what Mr. Mann is saying is that we need to celebrate these moments more. Perhaps.
I could be wrong. But I like that thought. What do you think?
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