Ten-Finger Exercises

Story Telling

I brought lunch today for a friend who is packing up to move. She was very distraught, for a variety of reasons. One of them was a conversation she had just had with someone else. She had told him about an encounter she had had with a third person, a priest, who she felt had somehow used her. He had greeted her warmly and insisted on a hug in front of a number of people; yet she and this priest had never been hugging friends.

She is a good story teller; I don't mean, by that, a liar. She is a dramatic person who sees the world in vivid hues, with more dark shadows than I see. When she feels used, criticized or taken in, she feels it mightily.

I have often wondered how to take some of the dilemmas she winds herself in, how to help her free herself from them. Her passions are strong. When my impulse is to say, "Aren't you overdoing it a bit?" I know she will be offended.

Today I discovered a secret I've never known in the years she's been my friend: she knew all this about herself already. She was in tears because, now that she's leaving, she just painted this priest with her lavish brush. She wonders if things really happened that way, or if that was just her story.

C.L. Hanna's blog today directed me several places, and one was to a blog by Chalaedra about a Wish List. In it she mentioned two things she'd thought that weren't exactly the way she remembered them. The story she told herself wasn't quite accurate, on revisiting the scenes.

It was a very interesting thought: where do we get some of the ideas we have? I remember a pair of shoes my dad had that we teased him about because they were so ugly and coming apart. He took them on a trip, and, because of the state fair in Madison, we could only find a place to stay in a downtown hotel. One day Mother and I were talking and laughing about how we had thrown them out the window of the sixth floor of the hotel,and then got embarrassed and went down and retrieved them. Twenty years later we couldn't remember if we really had done that or not. It had become our story, real or fiction. (That was still before her dementia came on.)

I'm sure some of the things I wrote about Mother last night would fall in the same catagory: maybe not so much that they didn't really happen, but that our takes on them would be entirely different. Depends on who tells the story. Her side about cooking could be that I never paid attention to what she was doing or I would have learned. Instead, all I wanted to do was stand and talk to her. That's probably completely true.