A story unrelated to an event... or....?

It's hard to explain, but back in the condominium that my family used to live in while in Connecticut, there was a sidewalk. And along that sidewalk there was a spot where I could put the front wheel of my bike into the grass, lower the kickstand and peddle the bike like it was a stationary bike. Eventually I wore a groove into the hard packed dirt, and it became easier to stay in that one spot and peddle. I remember doing this in the summer. I remember that there was green grass, and that I was peddling there while waiting for a friend of mine to come over. I remember I sat there for a long time... maybe half an hour, and I don't remember if my friend ever showed up.

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If I were to just look at this story, and I didn't know me, I'd still probably guess that I was white, from a family whose parents were probably young, and might have belonged to the lower middle class, but still not too bad off. And that would all be based on the fact that we were living in a condominium in Connecticut, and that I had a bike. I don't think it says much about my gender... I don't even remember if the friend I was waiting for was a girl or a boy. And the bike was red, not pink or blue. It occurs to me now that this fragment of a memory is actually rather significant in my life; I don't know how long after this happened that it was, but eventually we moved to Oregon. Once arriving in Oregon we moved again three times, and each time I left friends that I would never see again (except for a rather odd occurrence in the accounting office three weeks back... but that's another story). For whatever reason this memory and our move to Oregon seem related, though in literal time I doubt that this memory was anywhere close to when I found out about the move.

I appreciate Michaels small distillation of John Shea - "that we use narrative to deal with emotions (usually extreme, including fear, terror, joy, elation, sorrow, shame, mystery, hope)." There's a lot to the Shea handout, but this makes sense to me as I look at my fragment of a memory. If I were to use that memory now to write the story of my life it would naturally fall just after finding out that we were moving, or perhaps just before. There's something lonely about what I was doing, but I loved it all the same. In retrospect, not having that groove in the dirt to peddle in when we got to Oregon took all the joy out of biking for me, and from then on, I was never able to make friends in the same capacity as before...

But it's just a story. I could embellish it to better communicate the loneliness, but probably with all of these stories, you really just had to be there to get the full sense of it. Or, well, who's to say that being there would have made any difference. I don't remember much from my childhood, so there must have been something important about that moment – my other memories include various injuries, fears, and the removal of my favorite stuffed animal... all very traumatic events for a kid. So it's possible that, like I said, this moment in time has nothing to do with the move across country, but in my mind that is what it has come to represent. And Shea mentions that a bit, does he not? That the story is bigger then the event itself? That what happened has to be explained in simple words with simple emotions?

I'm not certain... I've reread the Shea handout a few times, and like most things dealing with this class, I feel that I almost understand something, but am not very clear on what it is that I might understand.... This was just a little story that represented a big event, and tells the tale of emotions that we can all relate too... I think there's something to that.