Stories

When her daughter was little, Nina painted all the walls in her bedroom with magnetic paint (three coats), then topped them off with three more coats of chalkboard paint.  Her room is now covered with her daughter's drawings and treasures she likes to display.  It's an ever-changing gallery of an eleven-year-old girl named America, a girl who excels in all her classes at school and is way beyond her grade-level in reading.

Nina is a single mother inspired by the single mother of our mayor and his brother, the Castro brothers. She and America are planning a road trip out west this summer,  hoping to see the national parks.  Nina wants to show her daughter the country she's named for.

I can imagine America, though I've never met her, a voracious reader, in a room in which she draws on the walls.  Her mother has collected all her art work and poems and stapled them in old Rolling Stones magazines, and America knows that's been her mother's way to save her childhood memories.

I met another parent today: a man whose name I don't know but whom I see at a local restaurant from time to time.  When I asked him how his day was going, he was beaming.  "I'm ecstatic!" he said.  He then told me the story of how he's tried for years to get his two children back from their "crazy" mother and finally her mental illness has gotten so bad that he's getting them back, two children, ages 12 and 14, one who is autistic, the other mentally retarded.

Everyone has a story.  Some days I'm too absorbed in figuring out what to do next on my to-do list to listen.  But when I do, I'm always inspired.  People love to share their good news and ideas and struggles, even with strangers.  We all want to open our old magazines, so to speak, and show other people what we've valued enough to staple in them.  When our patience has paid off, we want to share the good outcome.  When we're in a quandary, we want to tell the story to illuminate the path to the next chapter.

I have spent much of January in stories: reading three novels and watching several good series on Netflix: Middlemarch, most recently; The Newsroom; House of Cards; Rectify.  Today I will read to the end of Someone, by Alice McDermott, an excellent novel.

What inspired me to watch Middlemarch, and to start reading the super-long novel, was a program on NPR I heard on Thursday night: On Point with Tom Ashbrook.  Here's the link: http://onpoint.wbur.org/2014/01/30/middlemarch-george-eliot-rebecca-mead.  

Rebecca Mead has read and re-read George Eliot's Victorian novel many times; she's written a book called My Life in Middlemarch.  "It has knit itself into me," she says in the interview--wondering what her life would have been without the "lens" the novel has given her for looking at her own life.  "A great book can be a companion," she says.  "Reading a great novel can make us a bigger, broader people--because you get to be in someone else's head for a while."

George Eliot was a brilliant, notorious woman who chose to live against the grain of life in Victorian society. She was "an astoundingly bold person," a child of uneducated parents, fearless. In her books, according to this fascinating interview, George Eliot (who came after Jane Austin) gave readers entry into the inner lives of individuals in a way that no other writer before her had done so well.   "She put the action inside"--inside the minds and marriages and morality structures of the people who lived in Middlemarch.

We all know what it means to find companionship in books and to wish the book would go on and on.  From great novels, we enter into the perspective of others.  We feel their struggles, we extend our sympathies, we build empathy.

I cannot imagine a life without stories--the ones I read, the ones people share in writing groups, the ones I encounter in talking with strangers.  Reading and listening to stories, we know we are not alone.  Reading great literature, our lives are stretched, made bigger, seasoned.