Tuesday, June 24, 2008

An Abundance of Katherines

A quote from the book: (Bits and pieces, pieced together…I know, I am an editors nightmare, but I tried to make it make sense.)

"If the future is forever, he thought, then eventually it will swallow us all up."... "The future will erase everything--there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible."

“But there's another way. There are stories."... "And he found himself thinking that maybe stories don't just make us matter to each other - maybe they're also the only way to the infinite mattering he'd been after for so long.

And Collin thought: Because...even if it is a dumb story, telling it changes other people just the slightest little bit, just as living the story changes me. An infinitesimal change. And that infinitesimal change ripples outward - ever smaller but everlasting. I will get forgotten, but the stories will last. And so we all matter, maybe less than a lot, but always more than none."

Those of you who know me, (especially those who have known me the longest) must realize when I got to this page and read it, how big I smiled.

My whole life is full of stories, half of why I write my blog is because I believe honestly, that I was about to burst from story overload. I have been writing a journal since I was in second grade; a sort of desperate attempt to fling my stories out in to the world like some sort of wildflower seeds, that in some remote way, I hoped would take root somewhere. Somehow, I don’t believe that it ever mattered to me where they were, or who, cultivated them. It was that I told them. And to this day, I get no greater pleasure than hearing the relentless teasing about my antics, my plays, and my characters from my youth...because, well, they are my stories, and clearly, they are living on. (Especially Juanita, my pseudo-self in middle school. But that is just a whole OTHER story, for another day!)

Yeee-Haw, a good book. My girls will most certainly be reading it when they get a little older...I kind of have to get to the birds and bees first...Not that there is much of it, but somehow, I think I should probably go over that instead of depending on "back of the bus learning."

1 comment:

JennyHen said...

Didn't Jaunita marry Valdimiar the Russian Cab Driver? I think they had twins and named them Turk 182 and Stew Hixx.