"Comparative Content"

Something I am now reading has sent me reeling in my blogatorial boots.

Here’s the thing.

The stories you write about are the stories that happened to you.  (Unless you write fiction.  Which are stories that happened to no one.)

In the context in question – by which I mean this one – there is something I notice, and I decide it’s worth writing about.  That’s my procedural “M.O.”, what I do five days a week.  (With breaks for unscheduled health issues, and High Holidays.)

Today, for example, I was pondering an event that took place a few decades ago, when it suddenly occurred to me that it had happened to me again.  Not recently – little happens to me recently – a few decades ago, minus a couple of years.

This is not me, telling the same story twice.  It’s me, telling two different stories that are exactly the same once.

To me, that seems interesting all by itself.

Before even telling the stories.

Which are, in chronological order, the following:

I am nineteen years old.  It is June, a month before the beginning of camp.  I have been hired by the camp’s owner for secretarial purposes, working in his office, typing and answering the phone.  (At a dollar an hour.)

Sometimes, I am in there alone, “there” being a Ground Floor office of a small  building in a proximate suburb of Toronto, typing away, sometimes incompetently, by which I do not mean typographical errors.  I made a lot of those too, but that is not what I’m talking about.

My most egregious clerical “boo-boo” was typing an entire page of camper “Mailing Lists” with the carbon paper – ask an old person what that is – inserted erroneously, leaving the proceeding “Duplicate Copy” not on a second page, but on the back of the first page, and typed backwards.

Anyway…

There I am, alone and typing – or in that case, retyping – and, being alone and having that particular habit, I am, similar to a Disney “dwarf”, not whistling, but instead lustily singing while I work.  Overly loudly, perhaps.  But so what?  I was alone.

What I did not know was that my private performance had wafted up through the above air vent, floated mellifluously through the connecting duct, descending finally into “Stubby’s Diner”, located on the Ground Floor of the building, but in front.  

As a result, when entering “Stubby’s” for a lunchtime hamburger, I was met with thunderous applause, and shouts of, “Sing us a song!”

So there’s that.

Three years later, I am living in London, age twenty-two, toiling as an interim toy-wrapper at the famed Harrods Department Store.

As the “Employees’ Washroom” included a shower, I began showering during my “Lunch Hour”, as my low-rent apartment included neither bathtub nor shower, and I was unwilling to revisit the “Oasis Public Baths”, bathing – albeit in an enclosed “closet” – amongst miners and chimney sweeps.

Having forgotten the lesson learned earlier at “Stubby’s”, I sang loudly, as I scrubbed off clinging toy-wrapping detritus.

Once again, my “private performance” flew up to the above air vent and through the connecting air duct, my rousing “Impossible Dream” permeating the nearby “purchasing areas” of Harrods.

(Fortunately, I was unimplicated in this invasion on toy store decorum, as it would have certainly meant my immediate “sacking.”)

So there’s that too.

Twice had my singing reached beyond the secret stage of my personal concert.  Which felt like a fine idea for an upcoming blog post.

It so happens, however, that I am currently reading Roald Dahl’s memoir Going Solo.  Forget the comparative quality of the writing, which is unchallengingly “He wins.”  I allude only to “contrasting content.”

I am but partway through the book, and Dahl, working in Africa, has already confronted an eight-foot poisonous cobra, and a lion, carrying a terrified woman off in his mouth.

And I realize,

"My stories are missing something."

Dahl gives us lions and cobras.  I do “air-duct entertainment.”

Mouth-dropping stories abound in Going Solo.  Check out Page 79.  Ferried across a river along with his car on an East-African “road trip”,

“At the Wami river the natives put my car on a raft and six strong men on the opposite bank started to pull me across the hundred yards or so of water with a rope, chanting as they pulled.  The river was running swiftly and in midstream the slim raft upon which my car and I were balanced began to get carried down-river by the current.  The six strong men chanted louder and pulled harder and I sat helpless in the car watching the crocodiles swimming around the raft, and the crocodiles stared up at me with their cruel dark eyes.” 

There is that.  And then there’s me, trying to hold your attention with lightweight “air duct embarrassments.”

I am a captive of happenstance.  What I write comes from personal experience.

Sorry about no crocodiles.

Of course if one comes to the house, you will definitely hear about it.