S is for Stories—the Ones I Didn’t Tell

I came up with four words for the letter S in the A to Z Challenge: secrets, stuff, snow and serendipity.

Serendipity was the first to go. It’s one of my favorite words in the English language, and I’ve had plenty of serendipitous moments in my life, but none of them fit my theme of the humans, habits, hidden joys and heartaches that shaped my world. Still, who doesn’t love a story about the universe lining things up just right? That thought reminds me of the day I got myself in trouble at book club by using the word serendipity in the wrong company.

The book was My Mrs. Brown. As the facilitator went around the room, women offered comments like, “It was a sweet book,” and “It was a feel-good book.” When it was my turn, I said I thought it was mostly boring. Someone laughed and said, “We can always count on Jean to have a different opinion.”

Then the next woman gushed about how the book was full of divine interventions. “It was so inspirational!”

Say what?

I asked her for an example. She said it was a divine intervention that the main character took a job packing up the house of a wealthy woman who had died. Finding a dress in the closet was a divine intervention. Someone giving Mrs. Brown a book about fashion was a divine intervention.

I couldn’t help myself. “I’d call all those things serendipity. How do you define a divine intervention?”

She bristled. “I don’t believe in serendipity. Everything is divine intervention!”

I took that to mean only non-believers use the word serendipity. Since I’m an agnostic and it’s one of my favorite words, I would have let it drop before we wandered into religion—but someone else asked if I thought serendipity was always happy little events. She threw me a life-line.

“Yes,” I said. “I just don’t think God has time to help someone find a dress when there are more important things going on in the world.”

“So you’re saying divine interventions are more like miracles,” she said, clarifying my words.

Bingo. She won the Kewpie doll.

Next I tried snow as my prompt, but that went nowhere fast. Long-time readers know my husband plowed snow for over forty years and I did it for seventeen. It’s well documented in this blog. But newcomers might enjoy hearing about a game we occasionally played in the middle of the night when conditions were just right. We called it Rat Hockey.

Yes, real rats.

They’d venture out onto the mall parking lot and we’d escort them across it with two or three trucks, turning our plows back and forth to make the rat slide across the icy surface. We’d “steal” the rat from each other mid-slide, and you scored if you were the one who ran it into a snowbank. As far as we knew, none of the rats were harmed. We’d see them dig their way out of the snowbank and look around as if to say, “What the hell just happened?” It’s a wonder none of us ever collided. Imagine explaining that to an insurance adjuster.

Then I moved on to stuff, but that got cut too. I’d just watched a couple episodes of Hoarders, and I didn’t want readers thinking I had—or ever had—stuff in that quantity or quality. But lately I’ve been scaring myself with my inability to throw out three glass jars that once held Meijer-brand peaches. They’re such a pretty shape. Surely I can find a use for them. I’m almost afraid to go to Meijer this week for fear one of those peach jars will jump in my cart like a stray kitten no one could leave behind. If I buy peaches every two weeks, you do the math. Hoarding has to start somewhere.

The last word I crossed off was secrets. As much as I up-chuck my life online, one could assume I’ve already dissected every minute of my time on earth. I haven’t. Not by a long shot. One secret in particular I've been keeping since 1969. I finally told my youngest niece a year ago. She said all the right things—“I’m so sorry that happened to you” blab, blab, blab—but it didn’t make me feel better. It wasn’t cathartic. Remembering that made me realize I can’t write about secrets. Not this year.

Having eliminated all my S word prompts I have nothing left in my writer’s tool box! I guess I’ll have to skip forward to my T topic for tomorrow. Please come back. ©