The Story of Our Lives

As I walked into the Two Dogs Café, I braced myself for the possiblity that the patrons of the bar would be drenched with gloom and despair. If my fears were founded, I knew it would not be a happy day.

But before I could even sit down or get a feel for the atmosphere, a short and dark Carlos of Sturgis waved to me from the corner of the bar.

“How’s Bamboo today?” he asked cheerfully in his standard third person. I’ve noticed that this removed acknowledgment is his favorite and, being the charismatic leader he is, he has encouraged many others in the area to speak in this same fashion.

I gladly realized my fears were misplaced and then thought that it was curious how a selected reading of Hemingway had so easily encouraged me to reconsider time. But that week I had a lot of time to reconsider it.

At some point, long before I reached the bar, I also read about the modern scientists who now claim time travel to the past is impossible. They reported nothing new, of course, about travel to the future.

Fools, I thought. Had they not read Hemmingway? Had they not traveled in their minds to days gone by to learn from anyone? Had I not learned their own claim only after they had spoken it?

Earlier that afternoon I sped up the ramp onto the tired, looping interstate. Approximately two minutes after I began my trip down the highway, I slowed to a stop in between exits. The traffic had clogged and I could see that an accident had occurred only moments before about 300 meters in front of me. Soon, other stopped cars and trucks surrounded me there in between the off ramps. I switched off the truck’s engine and sat there helplessly watching as a screaming ambulance, fire truck and other emergency vehicles all responded promptly to the scene.

I could see that soon after the emergency crews arrived their urgency was replaced with a more methodical pace. Bad news here, I thought. Yet it was a well orchestrated response, no doubt one that took considerable practice to perfect.

Crash scene photos were taken, crucial distances were measured and witnesses were isolated and interviewed. Paramedics first scrambled with heavy gear and then walked with a brisk understanding of their task and the nonchalant tow tuck driver stood quietly near his truck and smoked a cigarette. As their orderly routine progressed, I realized I would be there a while.

So, I retrieved The Sun Also Rises from its secret hiding spot and proceeded to finish the book there on the highway while the fatal accident was cleared away a few hundred meters in front of me.

I only had about 70 pages remaining. Honestly, up to that point, I found the story meandering and filled with pointless dialogue. Perhaps, I thought, it was only pointed in how it had once affected and altered American literature. Had it been written today, though, I doubted it would have found a publisher.

Semantics is alive and the words in this story are so old. Sound cautions for any future author, I suppose, but I wondered how any modern child could understand them now. The words “sore” and “tight”, for example, were employed in a very trendy way for the time but in uncommon way for our reference.

After the first few chapters, I had to ask young D$ to confirm the style in which the word “rather” is spoken by major characters in the book. To my mind, whether you are prone to the harsh Midwestern “r” or the softer coastal version, you would never properly voice that word in the tonal way Hemmingway heard it if you hadn’t been fed a steady diet of high-browed movies from the 1940’s.

“Don’t let’s talk about it,” said Lady Ashley.

The catchy little tune “pity and irony” was sung by the entire chorus throughout but, in fact, I discovered little irony rising to the surface.

But then I entered the arena and was finally introduced to the bull fight and the grand festival of Pamplona. It was the part of the story that I was anxiously awaiting but it still took me by surprise. As the scene went on, I wondered about all the possible ways to describe it and the unlimited endings it could have had. I expected that if it was like a modern American novel it was at this point that the plot would twist and turn into something more intriguing than what had proceeded. I halfway pondered how the bullfighter’s painful goring and bloody death would be described. I wondered how his unfulfilled love would bear up in the face of such tragedy.

Then the story ended with only the slightest tribute to what might have been.

Ha! What I thought for moment might be allusion to Hollywood, turned out to be more like testimony to Kansas: Waterless and flat -- very flat.

I closed the book and put it back in its secret hiding place. I wanted it to end differently but concluded my summary would end the same nonetheless. I thought that if I had been around at the time I would have urged an alternative. But it was very real, I guessed, and the author was shaped by his own perceptions of reality like we all are. In fact, I believed, those practiced, dishonest perceptions are what define our reality. If we just realized that effect and practiced it some more, maybe we would one day find a way to alter our reality just by thinking about it. Maybe we could then travel anywhere to any time and change the endings to better suit us. Maybe if we really wanted peace and justice in a world full of hate and crime, all we had to do was think about it really hard. I thought about that as I sit there frustrated in the traffic jam and I closed my eyes and tried to visualize myself driving happily down the highway towards my destination in the near future. Maybe, I thought, if I could just picture it clearly then the sea of cars would part and my vision would become reality.

The cars didn’t move and neither did I, or so it seemed.

And that’s where I’m stuck now, I thought, perfectly confusing the past while not seeing the present for what it is. Maybe all our individual perceptions work against each other. Maybe it was only in someone else’s reality that I was where I wanted to be while my present perception remained stalled. Maybe, I thought, it’s this little problem I have with the true now that keeps our perceptions from ever agreeing.

Finally, I awoke without any great fanfare and the line of cars and trucks ahead of me began to hum and creep forward so I started my engine and slowly followed the line, noting with surprise that I had sat there reading and thinking at full stop on the highway for nearly an hour and a half.

As I inched past the surreal scene of the wreck, my eyes quickly scanned the red and blue flashing light for clues to the devastation of the modern bullfight. In spite of my mild irritation for the delay in my travel, I quickly understood that I had nothing to complain about. I realized that then, at nearly that precise moment, shocked family members were just being notified of a terrible tragedy. More sad news from the past, more maddening reports from a now that had already happened, I thought.

And then the wrecked vehicle came into my view.

A crumpled motorcycle with mangled handle bars and dented fuel tank leaned on the road. I could tell only that it was a soft tail body style and its color had once been a dark purple. The tow truck driver shoveled fluid absorbent under the wreckage to mop the spilled oil and gas.

Suddenly, I fought with an unwanted and frightful thought as it crossed my mind. “It looks like Carlos’ bike,” I reluctantly told myself as I crawled slowly past the scene.

Soon, I was speeding down the highway, leaving the wreckage behind me, exactly where I wanted to be at one time. But try as I might to dismiss the idea that Carlos had lost his life on the road, that distressing thought lingered in the back of my mind. Once I completed my trip, I raced back to Two Dogs Café to anxiously read the past news and hoped I would arrive there long before my false perceptions did.

“Bamboo is fine,” I replied to Carlos as I sat down at the bar. “And it’s good to see Carlos alive and well.”

“Hey, I do what I can,” he answered with a sly smile while tipping his glass towards me, “but I can only do so much.”

That may be the story of our lives, I thought, the story of our lives.

Cheers,

Mb