You Have a Lifetime of Stories

People ask me, “Where do you get your writing ideas? I can’t think of anything to write about.”

Oh, my little future author, you have a lifetime of stories!

And sometimes you don’t even have to go looking for them.

Lou and I walk our neighborhood every morning. We live near the edge of town, and we have this funny little population of bunny rabbits that look more like somebody’s pets than wild rabbits. The story around here is that years ago there was a rabbit farm, and when the people left, the rabbits were turned loose. I have no idea if that’s completely true, but their descendants are still here, hopping through yards, eating our grass and entertaining people like me.

They’re adorable. They’ll let you get only so close before they either take off or freeze completely, apparently believing that if they don’t move, you can’t see them.

One morning, Lou and I came across a little domesticated-looking rabbit with a wild cottontail.

They were having a jumping contest.

At least that’s what it looked like to me.

One would spring straight up into the air, maybe three or four feet, come back down, and then the other one would do it. Up it went, as if to say, “Oh yeah? Watch this.”

Then the other one would go again.

Lou and I just stood there watching.

These two rabbits were so completely mesmerized with each other that for a while they didn’t even know we were there.

Until they did. And then, of course, they ran away like rabbits.

I stood there, watching them disappear, and felt a little rush of joy and gratitude. How often do you get invited into something like that? They were not putting on a show for us. We just happened to be happy audience.

It was maybe two minutes out of our routine morning. But I remember it. And now I’m telling you.

There’s a story.

When I look back at all the things I’ve written, I realize how many of them started exactly like that. Not with some grand idea. Just a moment I noticed, remembered, laughed about, wondered about, or couldn’t quite let go of.

We tend to think the stories worth telling must be the big ones. Heartbreak. Death. Marriage. Divorce. Great loves. Terrible mistakes. Those moments when life suddenly divides itself into before and after.

Of course I’ve written those stories too. But some of our stories are hiding in much smaller places. Sometimes all it takes to find one is a memory and a question:

What else do I remember?

For me, one of those memories starts with three little kids and some big paper bags under a bunch of pecan trees.

When I was in second grade, my two younger brothers and our family lived on a ranch with lots of pecan trees. We were close in age. I was two years older than Jimmy and three years older than the youngest, Ricky.

We were also competitive.

My mother, who had three little kids underfoot, figured out a pretty clever arrangement. She handed us big paper bags and sent us outside to gather pecans.

The payoff was homemade cookies.

That was plenty of motivation for us, at least for a while.

Pretty soon gathering pecans became a competition. Who had the most? Whose bag was fuller?  What else might we discover under the piles of leaves and pecans?

Eventually we’d get tired of it, and Ricky was usually the first one to start complaining. Since I was the oldest, somehow it became my job to keep him going. I could encourage him, challenge him with, “I think I have more than you do,” or resort to the one thing that almost always worked.

Cookies.

My mother always kept her promise. Every single time.

She loved pecans and just about every kind of nut, so later we’d all sit around the table cracking them. We kids weren’t very good at it. We were little and not exactly coordinated with a nutcracker, but we helped.

My mother would be there, sometimes my stepfather, our uncles or whoever happened to be around. We cracked pecans and talked. And cracked more pecans. It was quite a task.

Soon afterward, some of those pecans would end up in our favorite homemade chocolate chip cookies. But first, as reward for a job well done, we would each get one of the beaters or the bowl to lick. 

And then, the delightful aroma…we smelled them before we saw them, and by the time we were allowed “just one because it’s too close to dinner,” we were famished and volunteering to help make dinner so we could get to the dessert cookies faster.

And that’s pretty much the story.

Three little kids picked up pecans because their mother bribed them with cookies.

But something happened when I started remembering it.

First there were the pecans. Then the big paper bags came back. Then Ricky complaining. Our competitions. Me trying to keep my brothers going. My mother keeping her promise.

Then I could see us sitting around the table again, cracking pecans and talking. And the best part…licking the bowl and the beaters…and eating the cookies.

That’s one of the things I love about memories. You pull on one little thread, and sometimes an entire piece of your life comes tumbling out behind it.

We were happy-go-lucky little kids then. I can still see us. I hadn’t thought about those afternoons in years. 

Then there are memories that start out sweet enough and take a completely different turn.

When I was sixteen, a young man from Texas who was new to our school asked me to the prom.

My mother was thrilled.

She was from Texas herself, and when he arrived in a suit, full of good manners and that Texas drawl, she was practically head over heels.

I wasn’t.

I wasn’t particularly enthralled with him to begin with, but it wasn’t often that I could make my mother that happy by doing something I was perfectly willing to do. So I went.

He came inside, was polite and friendly, said “Yes, ma’am” about five different times, and held the car door open for me.

My mother thought he was wonderful.

We went to dinner and then to the prom.

He was boring.

Afterward, he drove to a park near the school, where this polite young man with the wonderful Texas drawl suddenly said:

“Put out or get out.”

Really?

Okay.

I opened the door.

I didn’t live that far away.

Apparently his plan had not included the possibility that I might actually choose the “get out” option. Poor boy. He had seriously miscalculated his audience.

“Oh! Get back in. I’ll take you home.”

So he did.

I never told my mother. I was very modest at sixteen, and my mother and I didn’t talk about things like that. I was embarrassed, and she had been so delighted with this Texas boy that I didn’t want to ruin it for her.

Besides, I had handled it.

There was another consideration. My mother was the oldest in her family and had four younger brothers. They were tough cowboys, not all that much older than I was, and VERY protective of me.

The last thing I needed was four cowboy uncles deciding this young man needed a lesson in how to treat their niece.

My mother wondered more than once why that nice Texas boy never asked me out again.

I never told her.

For years it was just an old prom story everybody knew except my mom.

Now, when I think about sixteen-year-old me opening that car door, I see things I couldn’t have seen then. I was young, modest, and embarrassed by the whole thing, but apparently I already knew what I wasn’t willing to put up with.

I didn’t make a speech or create a big scene. I opened the door. Maybe that’s part of what happens when we’ve lived a little life. We get to look back at the people we used to be through different eyes.

And THAT is what interests me about writing our stories.

I’ve shared some pretty turbulent stories from my life, and more than once someone has written to me afterward and said, “Thank you. It’s good to know I’m not the only one.”

Other times I’ve written about something fun and crazy and heard, “Oh my God, I did that too!”

I love both.

Because when we tell our stories, we’re doing more than telling people what happened to us. We’re showing them a little bit of who we are…how we think and how we feel.

That’s why I’ve come to think of sharing our stories as a gift.

It doesn’t always have to be a brave gift or a painful one. Sometimes the gift is making somebody laugh. Sometimes we remind another person of something they haven’t thought about in years. And sometimes we tell the truth about something hard and somebody out there realizes they weren’t the only one.

There’s something wonderful about that.

We have thousands of stories tucked away in us, and I wonder how many will disappear simply because we decided they weren’t important enough to tell.

They don’t all need some profound meaning. Thank God.

Some still piss us off. Some make us laugh every time we tell them. Some make more sense forty years later than they ever did while we were living them. Others are simply little pieces of a life that was ours.

Maybe we make this whole business of writing our stories harder than it needs to be.

THE STORY OF MY LIFE sounds exhausting.

So forget that.

Start with one thing.

Maybe it’s the tree in your backyard, your father’s car, a pair of boots, your first kiss, a dog you still miss, a Christmas dinner nobody has forgotten, or the time you got caught doing something you had absolutely no business doing.

Maybe it’s a big paper bag full of pecans.

Stay with it for a little while and ask yourself, “What else do I remember?”

One memory bumps into another. Somebody you haven’t thought about in thirty years suddenly shows up. You remember something your mother always said, the smell of your grandmother’s kitchen, a song, an old boyfriend, the car you saved for to drive, or something you believed with absolute certainty that makes you laugh now.

Before you know it, you have a story.

I’ve also been wondering what would happen if some of us did this together.

People who have lived a little life and have stories tucked away in all kinds of places. People who may never have thought of themselves as writers but have something to say.

I’m not sure what that looks like yet. I’m playing with it.

A place to remember and write. To share if we want to. To laugh at ourselves and each other. Maybe to understand a few things differently because we finally took the time to put words around them.

The more I think about it, the less interested I am in whether somebody can call themselves a writer.

I’m much more interested in asking:

What do you remember?

And maybe an even better question:

What story do you have that only you can tell?

There are plenty of people who grew up around pecan trees.

But only I had Ricky and Jimmy beside me, my mother waiting with the promise of cookies, and my particular family sitting around that particular table cracking pecans.

That story is mine.

Your stories are yours.

And when we tell them, somehow we give a little piece of ourselves to somebody else.

So don’t start with your life story.

Tell me one regular thing you remember.

The smaller the better.

Then follow it.

Let’s see where it takes you.

Love is ALL there is.

Diana