Where are we going here?

I am perhaps the most awkward cocktail party guest in the world.  Here’s why.

Sarah Weeks says she gets teased by her husband for being a bit of a story snob.  She says it’s true, she is a snob, so she can’t really defend herself.  She lacks patience for people who tell stories with no payoff.  In her mind, there’s no point in telling a story about the traffic you faced as you drove home from work.  “I was driving, and then the traffic got really bad.  And I sat in it.”  There’s no story arc to that, no interesting resolution.  I understand her point of view.  Unfortunately, it’s the kind of thing that keeps me from talking at cocktail parties, my least favorite venue.  I’m just not good at telling stories that have any kind of “so what,”  off the top of my head   So I keep my mouth shut. In my head, I’m composing.  I take in snippets of conversation, imagine my responses, reject most of them.  Revise. Reject.  Re-revise.  The next morning, I could come back to the person with a fairly well-composed rejoinder (I originally wrote “comment,” but revised it to the more appropriate word “rejoinder”), but most parties are over by then.

Sarah said something I’m wrangling with, a bit.  She said that a storyteller is like an archer.  She’s armed with a bow and arrow (the raw material of a story), but she has to have some kind of target in mind.  She has to aim for an ending and move the story in that direction.  Without that, the story degrades to babbling.  I think that’s true.   I’ve heard so many 5th graders end a Morning Meeting share about a weekend moment with the words, “aaaaand…yeah.”  That stretched out “and” is  like their mind searching for the significance of the moment or the lesson or the conclusion.  As they run out of breath, they resign themselves to the non-ending ending, “yeah,” an affirmation that the moment indeed happened, but that the meaning remains a mystery.

Of course, I never want to end a conversation or any story that way, but I’m thinking that these slices are somehow different.  They’re sometimes stories, but other times they’re just the bow and the arrow flung into the ether.  When I was a kid, I learned a rhyme that started out that way.  “I shoot an arrow through the air, and where it lands, I do not care.”  I don’t remember the next line.  It probably goes something like, “Aaaand….yeah.”  Most of my slices begin with that:  A moment and an emotion that don’t have any direction yet.  I think there’s a place for that as well.  I’ll write until I figure out where I’m aiming.  The problem is, I don’t want to take readers for a long flight to nowhere.  Readers are busy, too.

Today, I scrolled through my notebook entries, looking for my idea list.  I found it. One of the items was from our vacation in Arizona.  It said, “National Margarita Day, how does that become a thing?”  We’d been at a restaurant and the waitress, in that sing-song waitress voice had  declared, “It’s National Margarita Day, so all of our signature margaritas are half price.”  Of course, we’d ordered.  It would have been unpatriotic to dis the national honoring of a sacred drink.  Still, I wondered if I’d been duped somehow.  I wonder now, if this slice is fading away in Margaritaville.

I have no idea where that little moment could go.  Sorry, Sarah.  My arrow has no direction.  I could riff on the fact that it’s an immigrant drink, and America would be so much less of a country without the steady infusion of tequila from the south, but there’s the tone thing. I’d have to make sure that people understood I’m not making light of the very real issue of immigrant intolerance in this country. But then I’d just sound like a humorless person waking up the morning after National Margarita Day.   So I keep my mouth shut.

I shift my target. I could take aim at our intolerance for people who don’t participate in national rituals like observing National Margarita Day or standing for the National Anthem.  Again, tone problems.  Seriously?  You’re going from margaritas to Black Lives Matter?  Dude, you’re really desperate.

So, Sarah, do you see how the story snobs have this chilling effect on would-be storytellers?  I do, in fact,  think I have a point here.  My point is not that margaritas don’t deserve a day in the national spotlight, though I thought they already shined pretty brightly on the fifth of May.  It’s also not that margaritas are a symbol of the richness and importance of  immigrants in this country.  Certainly, my point isn’t that we should stand for every symbolic moment or commemoration, even if it rings as hollow as a gurgling straw at the bottom of a drink.  My point, I think, is that often, we have to write, or talk (maybe fortified by some artificial courage provided by the fermented agave plant), when we have no idea where we’re headed.

Maybe, Sarah, instead of seeing ourselves as the archer, armed with an arrow, aiming at a target, we have to actually hop onto that arrow (as ill-advised and risky as that may seem), and fly (under the influence of whatever emotion fueled its flight), and trust that  we can steer ourselves toward a point.

 

Aaaaaand……yeah.

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