Monday, November 06, 2006

Theme Week # 10

What would a small town be without the local mart where old biddies catch up on yesterdays gossip, or the meat market where men talk about their last hunt, and of course the potluck suppers benefiting so and so's "father's third cousin"?

Last night I attended a benefit supper for my brother-in-laws sister Laurel. She suffered a brain aneurysm six weeks ago. Laurel's your typical hearty Maine woman. She lacks a manicure, wears nothing but LL Bean clothes, and cooks a mean pot of fish chowder. She's at every family function but rarely says anything. She darts from room to room wiping crumbs, filling plates, and picking up empty beer bottles. If not for her devilish laugh and big smile, she'd live permanently in the background, and with no complaints.

Over two hundred people attended the supper. My sisters and their friends served spaghetti while I kept track of their children. Laurel's mother walked around showing of the newest great grandchild while the grandsons kept the pasta, and meatballs filled. In the far corner of the hall, wearing dickies and a red and black, checkered, wool coat sat Laurel's 79 year old father. Being a quiet man, it wasn't unusual for him to be hidden from the hustle and bustle. I watched as he looked at the serving line grow and the people buying tickets for the raffle. His eyes began to well with tears. Instinct was to run over and give him a big hug but then I thought of Laurel and how that moment was with her.

There's much to be said about small towns but at the end of the night, $8,000 was raised for a quiet woman with a big smile that few of those people really even knew.

3 Comments:

Blogger johngoldfine said...

Okay, that's the way it was and you hit the irony squarely in the last sentence.

But what if this were fiction and the facts were not enough; what if you had license to embroider, pump material up, shine spotlights, create interior monologue in various participants, imagine what people said in their cars going home, etc etc--would the irony sharpen? Is there a further wrinkle in this that fact does not allow you to pursue but that fact-fiction might?

5:51 PM  
Blogger Mainer said...

Honestly, I knew there was something more I needed to do. I started to add women gossiping, and even tried to suggest what might have happened the moment everyone left but I thought I would take myself off course. Everything you said makes sense. Is this what you were referring to in week 4?...Truth or Consequences

4:49 AM  
Blogger johngoldfine said...

Yeah, truth or consequences, very tricky stuff. A respected historian wrote a biography of President Reagan a few years ago--and included himself as a character, just to allow himself to create dialogue he did not actually hear and which there is no record of. The rightness of something like that can be argued either way, depending on whether truth is defined as only what is known, even when we know that truth leaves out a lot, or whether truth is what can be reasonably reconstructed because we know it must have happened in some similar way.

In this case, I'd say that your job is creative nonfiction, and that your take on the scene and its irony is all that matters. If you can sharpen and enhance that with likely material (no space invaders or President Bush dropping by or machine gun fire), go for it.

In other words, limiting yourself to simple facts is sometimes naive--you've already made decisions about what to include, what to drop; you already have your blind spots which may not be acknowledged; you already are not writing the whole truth. So, why not go a step further?

11:47 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home