Today Was a Good Story Day

As I mentioned in a previous post, I hadn’t swallowed up Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz and his other three titles with the fanaticism of a lot of people (including my husband who thought it was read-the-whole-book-outloud-to-me hysterical). But Donald is compelling enough in person to draw me into his story, especially during a speech he gave while I was presenting at Elmbrook’s women’s conference.

At its base, what he said (which later became his most recent book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years) was a bit of a Carpe Diem platform…or yet another twist on songs like Live Like You Were Dying. But that was cool by me. I think we should revisit Carpe Diem at least three thousand times if we want to live a healthy, happy life…

maybe more.

Miller stood on the stage with all the casualness of my husband when he emerges from the closet in a hoodie and running pants. Producers were working with him to convert his life story into a movie, he said. And, he wasn’t going to lie, there were times when they wanted to tweak his story. To make his conflicts bigger or his pursuit of love more daring. To make more moments more memorable.

While reviewing his life, Miller said he realized a lot of us are living unimpressive lives. We’re waking up and going to sleep to boring plot lines that center around bland ambitions like “I would really like to own a Volkswagon.” And so we work, clock in, clock out, fax things, stare at the ceiling in meetings, all so we can make payments and at the end of months and years, pay off the bank loan and own a Volkswagon free and clear.

But…that doesn’t make a very good story, Miller points out.

No one would go to a movie about a guy who wants to own a Volkswagon and then sleepwalks through his days, staring at a screen in a cubicle long enough to get it.

No one would even want to waste two dollars renting that movie.

To be honest, I’m not sure what Miller even said after that sentence, because I tend to get a bit drunk on those kinds of life-directioning sentences (I’ll have to tell you another story about Pedro Windsor-Garcia soon). I know what Miller said in the book, which included a clever example of a family that started a parade, but by the time he got to saying that in his speech, I was already lost in the planning of my own good story.

I’ve always believed God had a good story in mind for me, so I’ve never been shy about chasing it. I lived in a four story homeless shelter in South Side Chicago. Lead a relief trip to Ground Zero after the 911 attacks.  Married THE guy I met the first day of college and who had me so hooked after one date that I never looked back. Started a website. Wrote a book. Got a grant to take at-risk kids down south to the hotspots of the Civil Rights movement. Took in a 16 year old high school boy when we should’ve been raising babies. Lived in neighborhoods where my husband and I were the only white people for blocks and blocks. Wrote another book. Got into painting and learning Spanish. All the while, played games and laughed and laughed…and laughed…with my parents and brothers and then later, their wives. And then (drumroll, please) I gave birth to the sweetest, smiliest little boy we named Justus–meaning a man who stands up for what is right.

Oh, and just as importantly as any of that, I’ve made a point to drink deep of friendships. My friendships have been the type you would make movies about. They haven’t been perfect, and the scripts sometimes needed reworked, but nevertheless, the friendships–even the ones in imperfect stages–have been deep and affecting, the type that move you as a person…just like the ones they later drop into scripts, in hindsight, for the movie screen.

I love my friends. I always have. I always will. All of them.

(By the way, we also bought a couple houses, paid some car payments, went on lots of middle class vacations too but for some reason, those seem less important.)

But even if you were raised to “open the gates and seize the day” because you faithfully swooned over the music stylings and choreography of David and Jack (tell me you’ve seen the Newsies!), Miller’s point–and points like that–are important to let fall into your soul many, many times over in adulthood.

Because you want to remember your childish hopes and imaginations that lead you to choose a good story, even when life is mostly suburbs and office and co-workers and clocks and bills.

I’ll tell you a little bit more about the components of the current chapter in my story soon…in a later post, I mean.

But for right now, I’m trying to think about how to instill the belief in a good story in someone else.

Namely, the 11 month old Emperor we call Justus.

And that is why we’re celebrating Birthday Month this month.(As of the 22nd, he is a month away from being 1.)

That is why yesterday I gathered up every decoration we had in the house–posters and streamers and sparkly silver Birthday banners with tinfoily fringes–and hung them all at baby-eye-level (think two feet up) around the 1st floor of our house. That is why I blew up all the blue balloons in storage (all the time listening to Justus giggling tirades as each balloon grew bigger–like magic–with each breath). That is why I listened to ten different versions of Happy Birthday before finally settling on downloading the Biggest-Band Big-Band One I could find.

And that is why I pressed the “up” volume over and over until the music was blaring, swallowing up the first floor until the dog thought the circus had marched in through the back door when we weren’t looking. (How do I know what the dog was thinking? I just know.)

And then I plopped Justus down right in the center of all of it and we draped streamers all over our heads and around our necks and we laughed and danced, looking at each other like are-we-really-this-crazy-that-we’re-celebrating-birthday-MONTH (his dance is more of a grinning, rock back and forth, reckless arm flop sort of thing).

When we got tired of dancing, or when the dancing got tired of us, we collapsed onto the floor and Justus tore everything he wanted to. He ripped half the streamers down and crinkled them in his fist and rubbed them against his face to feel the papery texture.  He smashed the balloon into his face and yelled into it, listening to his own voice echo through its latex walls. He whipped the silver banner around like he was a tweaked-out Olympian gymnast waving the ribbon around in his floor routine. Then when we pulled down the rest of the streamers at the end of the day (just after it occurred to me to get out the camera), Justus rolled around in the pile of paper decorations like he was swimming in money.

So today, in his little eleven month old life, was a Good Story day.

And, yes, I know, he’s not even a year old yet, so he’ll never ever remember Birthday Month. There’s no chance whatsoever.

But, I think to myself, maybe he’ll remember “happy”–the emotion. Maybe he’ll have faint impressions of smiles and hugs and laughter on his psyche.

Maybe gentle voices and suggles and fun will embed themselves in the data that will drive the someday-adult him.

Maybe Justus will learn, not through one day but through a lot of good-story-days strung together that…

… even though life’s hurts tend to brand us more than life’s beauty…

… and even though a lot of us have been conditioned to link the negatives together, to put our wounds on a pedestal, to look for failures and abandonment in those around us…

…that we get to choose the things we dwell on…

or another way of saying it,

we get to decide what moments our story will be lived in.

(To share this story to people in your life, click the “share” button below, which allows you to email it or to post it on your social networks.)

***

Like the writing style and tone you see here? Then you might like my new memoir, Picking Dandelions: A Search for Eden Among Life’s Weeds.

***