Dykman: When all else fails
Struggling to find a conclusion among life's little disappointments
Published on Wed., April 4th, 2007
When all else fails, at least I have some good stories to tell.
And let’s face it — all else fails quite often. Tuesday night seems to repeat itself endlessly when you don’t have a car and the bank account reads in the single digits.
But when I think about the stories I’ve shared — the ones (when all else has failed) about lacking courage, the ones about needing to give advice and having none, the botched dates, the bad valentines — I’ve noticed that I finish the story and end the column, but I never come to any sort of conclusion.
Here’s what I mean: I tell this tragedy that goes something like this. Boy meets girl. They go on a couple of dates. One that particularly went well was a Royals game where they bought Hy-Vee tickets and snuck down to the third or forth row, talked about life, books, college, but not the weather, even though it was one of those June afternoons that justifies spending $6 on a lemonade.
Boy thinks it’s a sign when the Royals win.
But things go south, both for the boy and the Royals’ season.
History, along with my other columns, would tell us that things don’t work out, and it’s over for the boy.
And it is.
Anyway, I fear delivering a message like: Seize every opportunity you have; let no grocery store visit or graduation party slide crassly by.
The summer is coming to a close, and at a graduation party, the boy is feeling down. This is one of the last times he will see these people. He doesn’t know many of them, but he figures they all struggled through high school, acne and finals together, so they must be worth knowing.
His thoughts are heavy and force him to sit down. He wants you to know that he’s not making any of this up when he says he just happened to sit down at the same table as girl.
“I haven’t seen you in a long time,” she says. He feels worse. He leaves.
He and a friend go looking for a cup of coffee. It’s Sunday night, and the first two places they try are closed. Finally they stop in a grocery store. And it’s there, in aisle five, that boy sees girl again.
And it’s about this point, when I am done telling the story, that my friends start to grin.
Usually it’s “what a coincidence” or “what are the chances for that.” We start to talk momentarily about a belief in fate or destiny. And when it’s time for a second round of coffee, the absurdities and coincidences stay just that. This unspoken, yet assumed, “that’s-too-bad” mentality makes its way across the room as we realize our coffee is too hot to sip. We sit and wait in silence.
We leave it up to ourselves to decide what it means. We file it away with the names of former teachers and old telephone numbers, as we work busily on our math. I wonder what the purposes of these stories are, these slices of life? I wonder what it means that he saw her in a grocery store?
It could be something about lost opportunities, but that’s too simple. Anyway, I fear delivering a message like: Seize every opportunity you have; let no grocery store visit or graduation party slide crassly by.
It would be easier just to forget about coming to a conclusion and brand it a “good story” or “another one of those things that happen,” ending it abruptly with something that sounds nice and has a touch of the dramatic. Something like: The coffee’s cooled. This is the last time I tell a story like this.
Bryan Dykman is a Westwood freshman in English.
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