Story Time

Did you read about that chimp who mauled the woman and had to be killed?
Well, I saw the headline and just thought, "Oh boy. Bad chimp. Had to be killed."
Didn't think another thing about it until I actually read an article about the incident in the paper and then went back and clicked on the headline in the Huffpost because in the article it said that the chimp dressed himself, was toilet trained and essentially, lived like a human.

Here's what the Huffpost article said:
At the time of the 2003 incident, police said the Herolds told them the chimpanzee was toilet trained, dressed himself, took his own bath, ate at the table and drank wine from a stemmed glass. He also brushed his teeth using a Water Pik, logged onto the computer to look at pictures, and watched television using the remote control, police said.

Excuse me?

Oh hell. Forget that those dumb chimps in the wild who modify twigs to fish for termites or branches to spear bush pigs.

This crazy ape was using a computer!

The chimp's owner had noticed he was agitated the day he went postal and mauled a friend of hers and so she did what any normal woman would do- she put Xanax in his tea. Obviously not enough Xanax but still. She put it in HIS TEA! What sort of tea? Earl Gray? Lemon Zinger?

I WANT TO KNOW!

Yoko Ono said once that everyone has a story to tell.
I believe that.

In this play I'm in, one of my characters and her husband are extremely interested in everyone's story. "Everyone has a story!" I say about ten times during the course of her appearance.
And it's true. We all have a story to tell. Some of us have so many that we have to create blogs to tell them all.

Yesterday I mentioned in my post that my mother had, at one time, married my father-in-law. And hell, yes, that's a story. You better believe that's a story.

Not one I'm ready to tell yet, though, because if I do, I'll have to talk about some things that I don't generally talk about here. Okay. I've mentioned that I don't have a great relationship with my mother. It's common knowledge if you know me. But that story is so long and so involved and there are so many twisted fibers of my life and my mother's life which make it up that essentially, that one little story would be the entire story of my life.

Do you know what I mean?
Or at least one of the entire stories of my life.

Suffice it to say here for now that yes, my mother married my husband's father after his mother died and so, for awhile, my husband was my step-brother and my father-in-law was my stepfather and I don't even know what my relationship with my mother would have been called.
Too odd for words most likely and yes, possibly something that could only happen in the south. I don't know. Perhaps things like this happen in Michigan all the time.

This is why obituaries are so unsatisfying.

We all seem to die after battling some disease and we all were born somewhere and we are all predeceased by someone and we all leave someone behind and in each and every tiny detail there is, of course, another story which leads to another story and on into infinity, back to the very beginning of time and there is no way to tell all of those stories which make up even one of the one stories of the recently departed.

The chimp died after his owner, a woman who referred to him as her son, stabbed him and police shot him. His name was Travis. He knew how to drive a car. He was all that woman had in the world. Her husband had died, her daughter had died. Travis was her son.
She had to kill her son.
My mother married my father-in-law.
He died.
My mother and I do not have a good relationship.
I am a fifty-four year old woman.
I am the mother of four.
I have been married twice.

In each of those simple statements, there are stories within stories within stories. Most of us don't sit around a fire at night, telling those stories. We don't even sit on the front porch with a mason jar full of tea or moonshine telling those stories as the whippoorwills call and the lightening bugs dart and flicker.

But we sit at our computers sometimes and we write them out and then we send them out. No one has to read them. But sometimes they are so divinely interesting that we must.
Because it's as much in our nature to want to hear the stories as it is to tell them.

"Did I ever tell you the story of how I met your father?"
"Yes. But tell us again."

And again we open our mouths and the story within the story begins to form and out pour the words and it's the tiny details which create the interest that fuels the story-teller, that captures the listener.

We all have a story to tell.

If you had one story to tell, what would it be? What would the bare-bones statement be that would start it off?

I know you have one. I know it's special. It's yours.

Have you told it to anyone? Is it too scary, too crazy, too embarrassing, too precious, too magical, too sad, too convoluted, too personal to tell?

Lay out the bones and then think about them. Study them and ponder them.

What is your story?