The Story in The Story
It
is six thirty in the morning and I am sitting at our dining room table with a
cup of coffee on one side of me and the window half open on the other. I opened the window hoping that inspiration
would be carried on the back of the cool morning breeze. The half-light of the sun
barely illuminates the living room, which makes the dark grouping of objects
seem more like a suggestion of furniture instead of concrete reality. If I were
to stretch my arm through the window I could almost touch the brick corner of
our neighbor’s building. But it remains
just out of reach: as does any inspiration for a story.
As a writer a
great deal of my time is spent trying to bridge the world around me with the world
inside of me. Often times, Paul will catch me staring blankly into space. I worry that he feels like he is living with
a person who is experiencing the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease; someone
who is not always present in the world.
He will snap
his fingers in front of my face and say “Hello? Can you repeat what I just told
you?” When I flatly recount his story
verbatim he’ll look at me and say “Wow, my story sounds even more boring when
you tell it.” To which I respond
“Not
really.”
But that is the
crux of the matter. Any story can be told,
but it is the way in which it is told that matters. If I write about my
grandfather’s table, I can describe the way it looks. It is round with dark grained wood, curved
legs and has multiple leaves to make it bigger. All of these things are true. It is an object in this world. But if I speak of its journey from the mountains
of North Carolina to its spot in our dining room with our blended family
sitting around it for the first time together on the evening before our
marriage, it becomes something else. It becomes the bridge between this world
and my world; a story in a story.
“I choose a
block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need.” Rodin said.
I suppose
that is what I do with a block of words.
Whittling them down until the story hiding inside of the story is
revealed. It runs in my family. My grandfather did this with his
drawings. We would sit at his dining
room table and he would begin to draw as if the picture already existed on the
paper and his pencil merely highlighted it.
And so must his mother, who was a
musical prodigy, have done the same with him; at the very same table singing in
French as she played the Mandolin. The love of art and the art of love played
out over and over again upon this table.
Paul walks
into the living room humming and arranges the pillows on the now clearly
defined sofa. The clock above me plays
its tune and strikes eight. I sit up,
stretch my arms, look out through the window and catch a glimpse of my neighbor
sitting at his kitchen table. I wonder
if he has been there the whole time.
“Did you find
any perspiration?” Paul asks playfully, knowingly misusing the word as he
kisses me.
“Yep” I say,
ready to join the real world again. “It
was there in front of me the whole time.”
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