There’s a Story There
“Once-shattered confidence re-breaks easily in familiar places.” I just entered that in my phone. I said it to a friend this morning while discussing his team’s painful plight in a contest that reflected the worst of them. The sentence, sitting on the shards of a lopsided loss, has a story I can touch. It illuminates and helps us both to find a why-now-how that grounds us. Roots stretch out in all directions around the words. Maybe they still will in a month. Maybe they still will in a year. But then again, maybe they won’t. Most likely when I return to find this sentence under a random “Thoughts” heading on my iPhone, I won’t see the thinking that came before and after. The sentence will float as an alien object disconnected from the shaky ground that bore it. The tenderness will be gone.
I’m afraid I’ll forget. What he said, or how she crinkled up her nose when she said it. How the light looked poking its way through the trees. The way the song squeezed me as I topped the hill on a road I’ve driven down a thousand times. Where the sentence struck. I want to remember.
So, copious notes are EVERYWHERE. I don’t want to let the little darlings get away.
They’re on the backs of envelopes, on Post-its, on yellow legal pads and cute, spine-bound journals I’ve been gifted, the kind whose covers both scream and whisper clever sayings in glorious stamped on fonts. They’re mish-mashed under all sorts of headings usually unusually spelled in the “Notes” app on my phone. I make note of all kinds of things --what I noticed about the check-out clerk at Hobby Lobby . . . what I heard Matthew McConaughey say on that pod . . . what I felt when the wind changed from the south to the north-- how it snatched my breath along with the orangey-red maple leaves I’d been waiting on to turn. They’re all there.
Somewhere.
Though mostly when I find it, I can’t figure out what it means. Without the connective tissue that surrounded it at the moment, it often loses the hook it had in my heart.
Still, I scramble to collect both the pieces and the parts.
A lot of what gets jotted down for later inspection are random thoughts, not lines. Ideas for exploration that I’m certain will be fertile fodder for writing—searching, grappling, probing—at another time. Mostly when I go back and read them though, I have absolutely no idea what I was thinking when I wrote them down. The context not included in the entry has disappeared like a vapor. Whatever lane of thinking I was swimming in when I had the notion now is barricaded by Do Not Enter signs . I can’t find my way back in.
This happens far more often than I would like to admit. I’ll see something, hear something, scratch my chin, squish my face, then tilt my head and say (to no one in particular), “There’s a story there.” The question that follows the declarative statement is, “Will I be able to find it when I read the reminder I left myself?”
Occasionally, when re-reading a “keeper,” new and better tethers form. The arrangement of words in a certain order takes me places I probably couldn’t have gone to at the time I recorded them. They act as I’d hoped and also intended—as a breeding ground for exploration. An entry into a space that could use some looking around. That happens. But, honestly, it’s rare. Mostly the words are like strangers making faces at me from a foreign land.
As I scroll the entries on my phone, I am reminded that stand alones don’t really stand alone. They need surroundings to embed them. They are significant because of what exists within them but also because of what they exist within. It’s a package deal. I think, therefore, I will remember. I almost never do.
P.S. I’m an Idea Man