Story Eaters

This is the book my father’s mother gave him, and nearly half a century later he gave me. A tatty old book that opened up to me bright rivers of words that sing in my mind still.

 

As a solitary teenager, I read anything I could get my hands on. My mother went back and forth to the library while I was at school to keep me fed. I scoured my parents' bookshelves and read whatever caught my eye, age appropriate or not.  Why? Because I loved stories, because I wanted to escape, because I wanted to taste existences I did not have courage or lifetime enough to inhabit.

In these habits I was just being human: we are story eaters and can never have enough.  These endless permutations of words are sand whispering along a breath that began in the beginning and never stopped.  They are waterdrops streaming through fingers that will hold their memory as long as flesh lives on the bone.  They rise from their river beds to become clouds on the dusty wind, that will fall and reassemble on the grateful earth below. They gather in pools that shiver with facsimiles of the stories they once were, and we take from them and give each other to drink. And the thirsty ground takes what is left and pushes forth green shoots that become the crops on which we feed.

I have a reputation among my friends for storing memories.  How?  Because they became stories.  Schoolfriend Helen, aged 13, wrote in her Battle of Marathon essay, "There was much death on both sides.  And in the middle."  I told this snatched delight to my family over dinner.  I'm still telling it to this day.  I make sense of life’s challenges by finding the narrative. I trace my feelings back to their origins and mix them with remembered things and those ever shifting stories are me, whether I enjoy them or not. 

I am a story eater and I can never have enough.

Life's a beach, curated.

Under Devon blue skies and the too-hot sun we have had a happy and busy week marking our first anniversary here and the launch of my new business venture.  A year ago we were in the Midlands and a long way from the sea.  Now that has all changed.  One late afternoon we went to the beach for a walk just because we could, and I walked in the breaking surf where it meets the exposed sand.

There have been conversations about how we present curated lives to the world on Facebook, Insta, Twitter and the rest.  Mostly perfect moments with a few carefully selected honesties thrown in, that may show vulnerability but rarely show us at our truly black and awful worst.  But we've always done it.  Handprints and hunting scenes drawn with ochre and spit in sacred caves.  Fearsome deeds and heady frolics in ritual dance on pots and urns.  Philosophies on parchment and diary entries on pages that fade.  Photographs taken with care so as not to waste the film.  Home movie memories with voice-overs recorded in telephone tones.  I am talking, of course, about when we take the time to capture our images, not the unguarded moments when we leak the bleakest sides of ourselves.  That is a whole other conversation.

I've collected stories since I was a child.  Even as I leafed through my paternal grandmother's black and white photographs of dogs and big houses and sunny Cornish days, I pieced together from other sources dark tales of a beloved brother lost at war, a baby sister spoilt to passivity, an arranged marriage, glorious eccentricities and petty spites, a life that ended alone in alcoholism and tears.  

So please, enjoy this perfect moment with me.  I hope it makes you smile.  But do not envy it me.  My life is exactly like yours.  There are moments like these that melt my insides to sugared liquid sunshine.  And there are moments when I just get it all wrong.  There are vicious spiked moments of self-loathing that raise my fists against me and spit nasty at those trying to care.  And there are moments when I can lift another person simply with my smile, and notice their new hair, new coat, new shoes and remember to thank them for a passing kindness.  In the midst of such inconsistency and the power of all that is dark and bad, these moments of nobility and joy and truth and compassion keep us moving on, and it is good that we pin them down.  Because from out of the bottom of the casket of evil things rises Hope triumphant, and she unfurls her vast and shining wings and is bigger and higher than all dark swarms below.  The dark cannot put out a light.  But the light will always lift the dark, however small.