“I ’ l l tell you s om e st o r ies. Bu t I won’t t ell yo u all of them ,” s he s ays w i t h a wr y g r in, “ I have t o k eep a few for mys elf.”
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cracked smiles and a library in three languages. She relives her memories at her weekly canasta game with friends she made some seven decades ago. It’s the conversations they remember and share that make those few hours memorable every week, and with the players ranging from 79 to 90, there’s plenty of past to go Around. And perhaps this is what life is truly supposed to be, epochs defined by singular fleeting moments of such complete sublime absurdity that everything else falls into place accordingly, though with a certain measure of passionate disorder. The memorable occurrences of our notso-daily lives and all that happens on the edge of normalcy too often seems to slip through the cracks. I save these tidbits and scraps, halfassed reminders and unfinished thoughts I’ve heard along the way, and try to make sense of them. Because if not, nobody else will ever hear them, and that pains me the most. And so I steal all the ones I can find, for the sake of keeping them for another generation’s education and inspiration. Could be mischief worthy of a grin, a drama of love in the Great War, the police’s involvement in this and that; the first, the last, the only. Stories will never run out as long as we keep looking for them and, with luck, become a part of one. Perhaps you’ll find at your dinner table, as I did, a woman of 93-yearsold who casually mentions, but not without an honest smile, the five years she lived in British India. How she was the first woman in Tel Aviv to drive a car—and how she left it in neutral and sadly watched it tumble down a mountain. And her four husbands, the first and third of which were the same, the fourth of which was her childhood love in Lithuania.
She sorts through a handful of languages without missing a beat and still commands the attention of the whole table. The little details littered about her existence only highlight the nine or so decades she can reference like a rolodex. She’s lived the life writers try to fictionalize and still can’t compete with. “I’ll tell you some stories. But I won’t tell you all of them,” she says with a wry grin, “I have to keep a few for myself.” If it’s anything I hope for when I am old, it’s to look back over my life—mistakes, regrets, and all— and be able to say I filled in every waking moment with something worth remembering, even if I can no longer tell it quite right. I’ll give out inheritances of my fondest and most outlandish anecdotes for the youngest ones to pass off as their own, with the stipulation that they tell better ones to their own children. All of the leftovers will be donated to the public like a coloring book manual—proof of some once upon a time punk ass kid. I will sign it with a pen from that dirty motel. I will present the rules I lived by and I will hope they will never be taken literally or seriously. I will wish none of my exploits on anybody, but I will hope they find something similar. I will smile, one of those smiles I’d smile as a postscript to any good adventure. I will take kindling to the spark of mischief still flickering in my eye, and I will start a bonfire that can be seen for miles. I will curl up with a wide-eyed child, imagination muddy with the footprints of dinosaurs and Davy Crockett, and I will whisper the story I saved for long last. And I will hope to hear in return the true meaning of a half-decade of existence. So tell me a story. I’m sure you’ve got one lying around.