What's Your Story?

It seems that when we open a book, the book opens us. Last night we joined our daughter Amy and he family and friends to toast their great work in launching The Books For Walls Project, (Click for a link)  and notably its being featured on Interlochen Public Radio (Click to listen).  I sat across from a poet/cellist/dancer who had just returned from Chile and a writer who loves to stack firewood since she did it with her dad as a child and is helping light the fire under this project that celebrates not books, but the reading of them, not stories, but the stories of our reading stories. Further down the table were a freelance journalist who recently had the courage to quit his job and step out onto the thin ice of the work he loves, a dad who makes shoes in his tiny and profitable shop and aches to love his teenage daughter through her increasingly complex life. Kathy and Amy and her family have their stories too, of course, and you read mine right here.

We used to have a saying, sometimes asked rhetorically when somebody couldn’t figure us out. “What’s your story?” Like “Just who do you think you are?” asking someone for their story is a deeply intimate question. Books for Walls’ first challenge to its readers was to write in with their favorite book as a child. Like our daughter Margaret in her work at Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, (click for a link) www.rockhall.com who knew from the start that music links us to our memories, Amy learned that recalling our childhood books takes us to the experiences of our childhood. We sit in the place where we sat reading then, like I sat in the swing in the back yard, and feel the cool chains on the tender skin on the insides of my elbows, there behind the garage where my mother could not see that I was not playing with my friends, which she thought would be more normal. We recall our feelings, as I just did now, and remember ourselves, become reacquainted.

I remember, almost ironically, “I’m Mister Blue”, a song about a guy who lost his girl, and standing shyly against the wall at the 7th and 8th Grade dance for the kids from St. Mary’s. I’d followed my brother Dan’s encouragement to join him, but I almost literally hugged the wall in my fear of dancing with any of the girls that I saw every day in class, feeling somehow even more clumsy and uncomfortable than the innumerable other boys lining the wall with me.

Books and music can do that, can transport us to parts of ourselves that we’ve long forgotten.  Go ahead; think back. Recall a book you read when you were 10. Recall a song that played when you were a teenager with an increasingly complex life.  When you return, you will be more yourself than you are now.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.