Stories

One of the formative experiences of my life was watching some random news magazine television show back in the late 1980s.

I couldn’t tell you what the show was called, what network aired it, who hosted it, or even if it was actually aired in the 1980s. Maybe it was the early 90s. It was definitely pre-internet. It was a long time ago.

In this particular episode the host had gone out to the rural American west somewhere – one of those vast open landscapes where they don’t bother putting guardrails on the highways because what would you hit if you drove off the road? – to interview a reporter for a local newspaper. This is how long ago that was. There were still local newspapers.

The newspaper office was in a rundown little building on an empty street in town and it was piled with papers, typewriters, and the detritus of journalism before it went digital. There were probably half-empty cups of coffee sitting on desks as well. There would have to have been.

This local reporter had made a name for himself by writing human interest stories. Every week or month or however often the newspaper came out he had a story about somebody telling their tale, often just the most riveting thing you could ever read, and the host wanted to know how he found these people. Was there a trick to it?

The reporter just laughed. Everyone’s got a story, he said. You just have to ask them about it.

When the host seemed skeptical, the reporter walked over to one of the desks and picked up the local phone book. It was a fairly thin volume, as you’d expect from a place that looked like the whole population could fit into a minor league baseball stadium. This is another way you can tell how long ago this was, by the way. There were still paper phone books.

The reporter walked back to the host and told him to rip out a page at random, and when the host did that the reporter stuck it into the wall with a thumbtack and handed the host a dart. Throw it at the page, he said, and when the host did the reporter walked over to see whose name the dart had landed on.

They got into a car and drove out to that person’s home, a sun-bleached trailer on a dusty road under a sky that seemed to go on forever, and they knocked on the door. When someone answered, they introduced themselves as reporters and asked if they could talk for a while, just to see what their story was.

It was fascinating.

I don’t remember who lived in that trailer, or what they looked like, or even the story they told. But I do remember that it was the sort of story that you wouldn’t have imagined coming from someone living a quiet life on a dusty road under a sky that went on forever. Or maybe you would, if you knew someone like that.

And the lesson there, as the reporter had said, was that everyone’s got a story. You just have to ask them about it.

I write down a lot of stories here, because I have my own to tell. I am a historian, telling the stories of others for a living. I enjoy reading memoirs and blogs and the kind of social media posts that go on for multiple screens recounting some story or other – often trivial, sometimes outlandish, but never uninteresting. I love hearing other people tell their stories. I try to be a good listener when they do. Sometimes I succeed.

The world is not made of atoms and forces. It is made of stories, and if you ask people they will often tell you theirs.