Listening
What story will I hear today?
The other day, someone asked me if the people I interview are ever boring.
I sat in a circle of six women I don’t know very well yet. What I do know about each is a time in their lives that changed them—this one the survivor of a fire, that one a young widow. Sometimes the moments are smaller, and you know what they are if you listen. The quilter over there with her airy white hair and an accent that I remember from childhood spent years teaching in Las Cruces, a small New Mexico town with a strong cultural heritage. The other one, with her bright expression, the one who asked the question, has a long happy marriage and left behind a beautiful rose garden to come to this town by the sea.
There used to be a segment on 60 Minutes featuring a reporter who traveled around the country to interview ordinary people. He would throw a dart in a map, fly or drive to that town, then open the phone book (when such things existed) and open it at random to find a name, and called them to ask if he could interview them.
What an assignment! Can you imagine? I’ve always thought it might be one of the best jobs a person could have. All those stories! All those lives, woven from the threads of days, weeks, months, events, both big and small.
In other words, the answer to the question of boring people is no. Everyone is interesting, everyone has a story to share. As a writer, I feel like it is my obligation and my honor to listen to them, meeting people where they are to hear what they think and why and what marks and makes them. I sometimes ride a train or sit in an airport and try to really look at the individual humans around me, each face precious, and one I will almost certainly never see again. It’s an extraordinary privilege. We are on this planet right now, together, and by some miraculous confluence of fates, we are sitting side by side in an airport waiting area.
One reason I love the stories, the faces, is that one of the central questions my fiction revolves around why some people get through a crisis and others simply stop and get stuck in that moment forever. I remember a woman in a dive bar once telling me about the time she kissed her husband’s mistress, “so that we both know what the other tastes like.” It had been ten years and she was still living in that moment. I was going through a painful divorce myself, and she woke me up. Did I want to still be stuck ten years along in my own journey? If not, how did I move through it?
My husband says that everyone who sits down next to me on a plane or a park bench or a meeting will tell me their core story, or some important thing about their lives. It seems to be true--people do tell me their stories.
But it’s not anything extraordinary about me. I just want to hear. Anyone who wants to (and maybe you don’t—that’s okay, too), would have the same experience. The world is full of human beings who have lived their amazing, unique, interesting lives everywhere. The woman who has tended her home and family for sixty years in a tiny mountain town, the tired soldier, the teenager with feet that are still too big, the irritable looking old man over there (why is he grumpy? Does he hurt, inside or out? Has he been disappointed? Is he grieving?). All of them. All of us.
Has a stranger ever told you a story?
*I could not find the name of this segment. If you know what it was, please share the name with me.
People tell me their stories all the time--and I love it. I have friends who marvel that I talk to strangers, but meeting people and hearing their stories is mana for me. Also, years ago I heard a journalist from a small town in Idaho talk. He did something similar to the 60 minutes reporter, took the phone book, opened it a random, called someone up. He'd been doing it for years and he said he'd never, ever, found anyone who did not have a story. We're all carrying something, or many somethings, around inside us.
My favorite stories are from strangers on an airplane after my previous husband died. One person was a big game hunter but he did not tell many people and his ex wife was anorexic and he did not know it while he was married to her. As he relayed his tale and I relayed mine, the person next to him had a Bible open on his lap and never turned the page during the ride from Nashville to Detroit. On a trip from Philly to Seattle I sat near another man who told me his story too and it was a poignant one. I think he sort of fell for me during that ride. However, he was a big city person who played tennis and I was a country girl who did not. There is a lot more to that story and one I should write down one day. At the airport baggage terminal, I introduced him to my daughter. Later she said to me, “there is your friend, Mom.” And indeed for that 3 hours or so, he was my friend.