Everybody has a story

Steve Hartman of CBS has/had a series that I particularly enjoyed called, “Everybody has a story.” Kay often teases me about talking to both perfect and imperfect strangers. I, too, believe that everybody has a story and moreover, I would like to hear it. Reporter Hartman chooses a city or town in which to find a story by turning his back on a map of the US and throwing a dart over his shoulder. He then goes to that city or town and chooses a number at random from the phone book. Whoever answers the phone is the person he interviews, whether it is a four year old or a 94 year old. The most frequent response from people is that they don’t have a story but he skillfully finds that, indeed, everybody has a story.

I have found that to be true. At Curves, just in the last two weeks, I met Phoebe who is working on a new version of the Amplified Bible. She is fascinating and her story is too. This week I met Sally. As we conversed, we discovered that we both had been in Singapore and shared a fondness for tea or brunch at the Raffles hotel there. As we talked further, she told me that her father was Irish and her mother was British. She remembers being in the air raids in London, during the World War II, and listening for the sound of the bombs coming in. When the sound stopped, you knew that it was close. They would hide under the stairs. She told me about the gas masks for children that had Mickey Mouse painted on the front so the children wouldn’t be afraid. Of course a whole generation of children were traumatized and were afraid of Mickey Mouse!

I told her that she should really write down her memories for her nieces and nephews (she has no children). She said, as people often do, “Oh, I suppose I really should.”

No one has asked me to write my stories, but I just blithely write them anyway, because everybody has a story.

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