Everyone knows that the stories we tell about our lives are
constructions. They are a way of stringing
together what we take to be facts into a tale that helps us to explain
ourselves or perhaps to project the image that we want others to have of
us. Facts in themselves mean
nothing. They are like a floor full of
scattered beads; until we link them all together in some configuration, they
make no sense. This is a problem not
just for writers of memoir and autobiography but for historians, philosophers and
archaeologists as well, and as such not one that is going to be solved in a
blog post. What I wanted to do was to
simulate how it is to arrange these events to tell a story.
If you were to take ten events from your life, write them on
slips of paper and throw them in a baseball cap, would your best friend,
daughter or significant other be able put them order. I thought I’d try. To make this a bit easier, I will take events
not strictly from my life but from that of the Northen family of my generation.
Just number them from 1 to 10 in the order that you think happened. (Hint - #1
is a gimme.)
___Steve was killed in a car accident.
___A fire burned down the garage and back bedroom of the
house where we were living.
___Our family lived in Hawaii .
___Dave got married (first time).
___Mom was hospitalized with a blood clot for six months and
nearly died.
___Brother Pat was born.
___Maya was baptized at San Juan Capistrano mission.
___Judy moved to Tennessee .
___I was hit by a car driven by an uninsured 16 year old
girl.
___Dad joined the Navy.
Even when you have a sequence, though, it is still not a
story. What are the connections? What
are the causes/effects? What is missing
and how are the gaps filled in? As a
writer, and to a lesser extent, an amateur genealogist, these are the really
interesting questions. Given this bare
set of facts or the bare facts of your life and fueled by their own
imagination, what story would your son or daughter write?
Answers: 7, 5, 2, 8,
3, 6, 10, 9, 4, 1
3 comments:
That was fun. I got them all right. I guessed at the one about Maya.
I was pretty close. I just had no idea about you being hit by a car. I guess I need to hear that story.
Maura, when I was twelve years old I was riding my bike to the supermarket with my brother Steve and a sixteen year old driver hit my bike and dragged me. Then because my head was bleeding she took me home to her mother's house. Turned out I had a compound skull fracture. I still have the bump on my head from it.
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