My stories

Fluorescent lights bathed the small conference room in the basement of a local library. A portable tabletop lectern sat in the middle of a table situated ahead of the two other tables in the room. The Toastmasters International Club President tapped the gavel as the rest of the members found their seats. "Tonight," she said, "We're going to have an impromptu meeting. Instead of pre-assignments for each of the eight roles, we are going to draw assignments from a hat." In every Toastmasters International club meeting, the roles ensure the meeting runs smoothly.

When the hat came to me, I silently hoped that I would draw vote counter or timer, something easy, something simple. I didn't. To my horror, my slip said, "Give a five- to seven-minute speech—tell a story."

A little more than a year before, my wife had complained that I didn't communicate well, especially with strangers. She found my introverted responses embarrassing. So, to learn better communication skills, I joined a Toastmasters club. With each speech, I struggled with being in front of a group, and I often read directly from the text I had written out. But gradually I was able to look up, just using brief notes.

I was trying to follow the standard speech format: an introduction of the premise, a body that provided supporting information, and a conclusion that usually included a call to action. I gradually became able to do that, but the one thing I couldn't seem to do was hold the audience's attention. And then, "Give a speech—tell a story." I had about ten minutes while the technical stuff was going on and all the participants settled into their roles before I had to tell a story.

I'm an introvert; I never told people about things I had done, nor places I had been; I had no stories on tap. But I knew someone who did. That was it: my dad would tell stories of his adventures, often more than once, and always if he'd had a drink or two. I'd heard many of them so often they were memorized. So, I told one of his fishing stories that was exciting and funny.

What happened as I began the tale was the strangest thing that ever happened to me in a Toastmasters meeting. The timer, the vote counter, the evaluator, and all the others put their pens down beside their tally sheets and faced me, listening intently. To me, it was like a scene that had always been black and white, shifted to full color. Positive, instant feedback affected my presentation. I became more animated and the story more colorful.

That was the hook. I needed to know more about stories and why a simple tale of a fishing trip generated the enthusiasm of an audience. I wanted to understand how a story lit up an audience who seemed bored at dull presentations of ideas and plain facts.

People sometimes ask why I always wear a beard.

It's to hide the scars from my former profession. The scars inside, though, are worse. It was jealousy and sabotage that ended my career, and a lifelong friendship — but I'm putting the cart before the horse here.

It all started when we were kids. Donny and I were best pals, but boy were we competitive. Whatever one of us would do, the other had to outdo. One day Donny showed me how he could balance his mom's kitchen broom on end in the palm of his hand. The next day I called him over to show him I could do the same with my dad's shop broom; it had a longer handle and a heavier head.

He topped that by shifting the broom from hand to hand.

I balanced it on one finger and shifted it from finger to finger.

He put it on the point of his chin.

By the next summer, we had built a rig with a platform to hold a kitchen chair. Donny talked his little sister into sitting in the chair, but she fell out and broke her collarbone, and his mom said she couldn't do it anymore. Donny blamed it on me, of course. I could always count on Donny to pull a dirty trick when the chips were down.

The way things worked out, we each got jobs with rival carnivals, and the competition intensified. Donny had a girl balanced on a 20-foot pole. I went to a 40-foot pole with a manicurist and her customer. Donny countered with three Hungarian contortionists 50 feet up. I put an Italian family 65 feet up with an entire dinner setting with baked lasagna and huge goblets of red wine. We almost had some serious trouble with that one when little Mario spilled his.

I thought old "Donny the Magnificent" had finally beaten me once and for all when he balanced on his chin a 75-foot pole topped with a horse and rider in full parade dress holding a 10-foot staff flying a brightly spotlighted Old Glory. It was magnificent! I was depressed.

Then in a flash, it came to me. I could do this! I built a special rig and hired Millicent and her trainer. Millicent was four tons of the prettiest Indian elephant you ever saw. She was smart too. It didn't take long to teach her to sit in the chair, and she got real good at catching peanuts that were thrown to her.

The big night came, and the stadium we had leased was filled to capacity. The spotlights played on the elephant as the crane gently set her in the huge chair firmly welded to a platform 100 feet in the air. When the crane released Millicent's harness, another spot came on me. A hush came over the crowd. I grasped the pole firmly, raised it carefully to my chin, and backed slowly away from the supporting stand.

It was beautiful. Millicent sat up there as regal as an Indian princess, delicately picking peanuts out of the air that were thrown to her by spangled girls with slingshots. All 60,000 people in the stands sat in silent awe as Aldo, the strongman, threw her an Olympic-style torch, which she held aloft with pride.

In the silence, I heard a tiny squeak. I recognized that sound about the same time Millicent did. I saw her ears twitch, and her eyes grew large with fear. "Oh no!" I thought. "She's afraid of mice."

Almost instantly she was standing up in that chair dancing from foot to foot, waving the torch in front of her to ward off any impending mouse attack. While a hundred feet below, the bottom end of that pole was making some terrible gouges in my chin.

But you know — I might still have saved the day if the mouse Donny had sneaked into the stadium hadn't run up my pant leg.

We all have important tasks we must do every day. Sometimes we should write down reminders.

My wife started my morning with the announcement, "My mother's coming over for lunch, and I want to make a crab quiche. I need you to go to the grocery store."

"I'd be happy to do that, hon. What do you need?"

"I want you to get two cans of crab meat and a pound of Swiss cheese. Do you want me to write it down for you?"

"Naah, I've got it. I don't need a list for two items." As I was walking out of the door, I repeated for her, "Two cans of crab meat and a pound of Swiss cheese."

The grocery store was about five blocks away, and as I drove there the thought hit me, "I need some stuff for my lunches at work." I usually brown-bagged my lunches and was running out of bologna and sliced cheese.

When I got to the store, I headed straight for the deli section and picked up a package of sliced pastrami and some pickle and pimento loaf, a package of sliced American cheese and some provolone. Next, a sandwich needs some good bread. The bakery section provided some Hogi buns, and I found some pre-packaged apple turnovers. Pickles! There is nothing like a baby kosher dill to go along with a sandwich. Off to the condiment aisle. Oh, yeah, lettuce and tomatoes were an absolute must, and an avocado. Sometimes I mashed them up for my sandwich, and sometimes I just salted half an avocado and scooped the delicious meat out of the peel directly into my mouth.

I checked what I had in my cart, and it looked pretty good. There was a bunch of great stuff in there. But wait, did I have enough mustard and mayo at home? I'd better get some, so back to the condiment aisle. But tuna. Did I have tuna? I liked tuna. You know what's good? A little sweet pickle relish mixed in with the mayo and tuna and spread on a sandwich is so tasty. I found the section where cans of tuna filled an entire corner of the display. Just above the tuna were other fine kinds of canned seafood. I really like kipper snacks. A tin of kippers and one of those little single-serve cans of spinach make a super lunch. I have to eat the kippers outside, though, because the odor offends some of my coworkers. There were some boiled oysters. A little milk, butter, and salt and pepper, and you have an oyster stew. Oh — there was the crab meat; Linda wanted some crab. I put a can in my cart.

I couldn't think of anything else, so I checked out and headed home with my groceries. Linda would be proud of the way I had all the lunch needs for weeks.

She greeted me in the driveway and helped carry the bags into the kitchen. As we put all the stuff out on the table before putting it away, Linda looked through it all and grabbed the receipt.

"You spent more than an hour at the store and all that money?" she scowled at me. "And you brought me one, only one, can of crab. Where's my Swiss cheese?"

Needless to say, I had to go back to the store for another can of crab and the Swiss cheese. I was banished and had to go to McD's for my own midday meal. Supper was lonely cold cuts, and Linda wouldn't talk to me until the next day.

In the future, I'll take a list if it's only one item — I'll take a list. And I'll make sure to check off each item. Other things can wait until the task list is completed.

Just like a body, a story is held up by a solid structure. That structure is universal and is used in every novel you read, every short story, and every movie you watch.

It begins with three things: place, time, and a character. These three things can occur in any order but must be in the first few sentences of any story. A place orients the reader/listener in space. It can be outer space or grandma's kitchen; anywhere, but somewhere. Time can be many years ago or just this morning, an afternoon, or midnight. Again, it defines much about the characters who inhabit the scene. A character must appear to carry the action of the story. The character doesn't have to be the hero or the villain; it can be the boy down the street mowing a lawn or even a pet watching from a porch.

Once the setting is established, the action begins when something unusual happens. A problem appears that must be addressed. Typically, the character addressing the problem encounters further difficulties and fails to solve it, only to find the danger has increased. Depending on the length of the tale, efforts and failures increase until it seems all is lost.

That is the crisis point where the situation is finally resolved; the hero or the villain wins, permanently or temporarily. But for now….

There is often a follow-up explaining how the characters' perspectives change.

That entire structure is so endemic, so ingrained in all of us, we recognize it instantly and don't question how it works. But once you've seen the bones, you can't unsee them. Then you can hang your own stories on a sturdy framework.

Imagine a crystal box, perhaps six inches square. In that box, on a black velvet base, sits a huge opal gem. The intensity and color of the gem change depending on where you are viewing it from. The box is a story. What the viewer sees in the opal, the story, is the moral, the emotion they personally experience, or the memory it invokes. Aesop told fables that expressed his idea of the moral of the story; that seldom happens anymore. Most storytellers recognize that what they put into a story often holds different understandings by listeners than the teller originally thought.

I wrote a tall tale, thinking it was just an entertaining tale. I never gave a thought that it was anything else. The story was a takeoff of a true event involving people and a place I knew well. I described the characters as I saw them, and only changed the events to stretch to the ridiculous (typical of all tall tales). I did not realize at the time that my description of the small town's only policeman, dressed as a local farmer rather than a uniformed officer, was particularly notable, just a bit humorous.

After I finished telling that story one evening, a woman came up to me and said, "What a good example of not judging a person by their appearance."

What do you think?