Silk hats came into style. Beaver became passé. Here’s just one example of how a seemingly foppish, silly change in the narrative—Nobody wears beaver anymore!—can model a new way of being. Fiction can offer a new way to live, with new goals and values that serve readers better than what’s currently in place. Why: The Big-Big Stuff
A friend of mine told me about his father dying. My friend sat at his father’s deathbed with a tape recorder and prompted him to tell old family stories for posterity. Near the end, it was just the two of them and the tape recorder, my friend Rick coaxing his dad to keep talking. A point came when his father paused and said, “I know you want more stories, but I need to see what Charlie wants.”
He said his brother Charlie, Rick’s uncle, had been standing in the corner of the room waiting patiently for some time. Of course, to Rick the corner in question looked empty. It was only Rick and his father in the room. Plus, his uncle had been dead a long time. He waited as his father bid Charlie hello and asked his business. And at that point Rick’s father, without another word, closed his eyes and died.
The scene is recorded, but Rick has never had the nerve to rewind and listen to the tape.
I love to tell that anecdote because it attracts stories so similar. Lisa tells of her brother’s deathbed, where his dog began to howl at the moment of his demise. The dog fell silent, but gazed upward at something, then turned and seemed to follow this something, always gazing up at the ceiling, through room after room until the dog reached the open back door. There the dog stood on the porch and stared as if following the path of something into the sky.
In school I took Ecstasy with some friends and went out clubbing in Vancouver, British Columbia. This was pre–World’s Fair Vancouver, when it was cheap, and flophouse hotels lined Granville Street. We were a bunch of kids too buzzed to sleep, sitting around a dark hotel room, each telling about the strangest things that had happened in his life so far. A friend, Franz, whom I hadn’t met until my junior year, talked about the summer his parents had sent him to work for family friends. He’d lived in Butte, Montana, but they sent him four hundred miles west to work at a florist shop. He lived with the owners, and one morning before dawn they loaded a fleet of vans with flowers and took off into the dark.
They drove into the desert, a wasteland of sand and sagebrush, until they arrived at an isolated railroad siding. No train, just train tracks that appeared out of the darkness. They waited. As dawn lit up the horizon an Amtrak passenger train appeared. It stopped beside their vans, and Franz’s boss instructed his crew to decorate the train. They draped swags of flowers down the sides of the railcars and hung wreaths of flowers on the locomotive. The passengers were bleary-eyed and grousing about the delay, shouting complaints that Franz could only answer with a shrug.
By now a caravan of automobiles had arrived. A bagpipe player climbed to the top of the locomotive and began to play, there in the first light of day, sand in every direction. In that desert cold that people forget is the flip side to the day’s sweltering heat. A bride emerged from another car, as did a groom, a wedding party. Franz distributed the bouquets and boutonnieres. The wedding party clambered up onto the locomotive along with a minister and joined the bagpipe player, and a wedding took place.
The moment the bride and groom kissed, Franz and his team began to strip the train of flowers. The newlyweds drove off. The caravan followed, and the train got under way for St. Louis.
Hearing this story among my stoned friends in a fleabag hotel, I was astounded. It wasn’t just the Ecstasy, but I thought Franz was pranking me, big time. The wedding he’d described had taken place a decade before, and I’d only known Franz for the past few months. I knew the date of the wedding because I’d been there. It had been my father’s second wedding, and he’d been determined to make it a stunt to annoy my mother who hadn’t remarried since their divorce. I’d been a kid in a denim leisure suit—look it up—and a kid-aged Franz had pinned the white rosebud to my lapel with the scream of bagpipes filling the vast, flat, freezing-cold landscape.
So many years and miles later, he’d be among my best friends at the University of Oregon. What were the chances? This isn’t only my story. It’s the bait or seed I use to coax ever more astonishing stories from people.
This is another reason to bother collecting stories. Because our existence is a constant flow of the impossible, the implausible, the coincidental. And what we see on television and in films must always be diluted to make it “believable.” We’re trained to live in constant denial of the miraculous. And it’s only by telling our stories that we get any sense of how extraordinary human existence actually can be.
To shut yourself off from these stories is to accept the banal version of reality that’s always used to frame advertisements for miracle wrinkle creams and miracle diet pills. It’s as if we’ve denied the real magic of life so that we can sell each other the sham magic of consumer products. Another example of the shop replacing the church.
If you were my student I’d tell you to reject the “believable” and go looking for the actual wonders that surround you. I’d tell
