So every once and a while, NPR’s This American Life does a show where they present 20 stories in 60 minutes. The stories are just a few minutes long and recount something interesting or quirky or puzzling or moving or funny that happened to the storyteller in a very short space of time.
Like the one by the guy who was nodded at in a store by someone he recognized but couldn’t place, and then after a torturous night of trying to remember who she was and feeling like an asshole, he finally concluded she must be an old flame because he could just barely remember being in love with her…And then realized the next morning that she’s the lady at Starbucks who gives him his coffee every day.
That one in particular made me think that these TAL stories are like blog posts: they’re short (because who has time for a blog post that takes an hour to read?) yet show how slices of the storyteller’s everyday life are actually interesting. And then I wondered if, on any given day, the average person had at least one thing that had happened to them that, if Ira Glass happened to call, they could turn into a short-short story.
You’ll never guess where I’m going with this.
This is the inaugural post for a new category on the Rib: Storytime. It’s kind of an experiment to see if there really is at least one thing in my average day that I can turn into a little story that others would find worth reading. The fact that “short” is a requirement makes the idea much less intimidating. I probably can’t do one every day due to time constraints, but several times a week is the goal.
Here goes nothing…
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Most days of the week, my office mate Shelby, who is also my mentor, and I meet for half an hour to discuss my projects. Lately we’ve taken to having this “meeting” outside, chatting as we walk around the neighborhood.
We work downtown in the International District which has everything in it from office workers like ourselves to shopkeepers to train travellers to the homeless. No one ever talks to us as we walk and we don’t talk to them.
Except today, as we were walking past an office building, someone yelled out “Obama!” We looked up from our conversation to see a black man crouching in the planter box in front of a window. He was looking straight at us, grinning from ear to ear.
It took me a second to realize the guy was washing the windows, not just crouching in the planter in order to shout at unsuspecting passers-by. “Obama!” he said again, and gave us the thumbs up.
We kept walking, but Shelby returned the thumbs up. “Obama!” she said to him, grinning just as widely.
“Obama!” I heard him say behind us. I swear I thought he would break into song.
I waited until we got all the way back to the office to check out the front of Shelby’s baseball hat. I was sure it had an Obama logo on it, but no. The window washer was just bursting with joy and couldn’t keep it to himself.
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