The Strange New Worlds All Around Us
By Barbara O'Neal | February 22, 2012 |
Lately, I’ve been a little obsessed with the idea of the endless number of stories there are in the world, right this very second. Every window in
Creative Commons photo by Djenvert
every house has a story. Every car driving beside me on the highway, every person I glimpse walking in the parkway or standing in line at the grocery store. Every year of history, in every town, in every graveyard.
I’ve always thought about the details that make lives unique, but lately, it’s taken on an obsessive quality that sometimes disconcerts my beloved, especially when he is trapped with me in a long drive at dusk, when I can see into cars and windows. What if you were God, I say to him, and could slip into any of those lives, any time you wanted, see what was going on? And if you were as big as God, wouldn’t that be something you might invent, just to keep yourself entertained? Christopher Robin dubbed this God’s Cable Network, and offered the idea that each of us is a channel.
As writers, we have the opportunity to switch channels a lot, and most of us are so curious we watch as many channels as we possibly can. We’re constantly surfing for new material, stowing away details, opening our eyes wider to find out what else we might discover.
This not only makes for an interesting career, it makes for an interesting life. This weekend, I had a chance to visit Fort Carson which is an enormous Army base at the foot of Cheyenne Mountain. The base has been a background fixture of my life, always present and influencing the world around me, but somehow in 50 years, I’d never actually been on base. My daughter-in-law is active military, however, and she had a baby Saturday (more on that in a minute), so I had to learn how to navigate the gates and find my way to the hospital on my own, even if it was in the middle of the night.
It was intimidating. There are soldiers in uniform, with helmets and guns, at every gate. Most of them are really nice (also approximately twelve), and every single one of them sort of giggled when they asked if my Kia, with its window stickers proclaiming that “Simple Living Saves Lives” was my own personal vehicle.
Despite my practice runs, I did end up getting lost when Morgan of course had to go to the hospital in the middle of the night. In the lonely dark, confused by the exits and loops, I panicked and went to the first gate I saw. Wrong as it turned out. I met the only severe soldier of the lot, who told me to turn around and get to another one.
Anyway. The base is fascinating. FASCINATING, from the rows of signs that say, loyalty, duty, never leave a fallen soldier behind, courage, selfless service, and other things along those lines, to the rows of barracks (each window a life, a story) and the shiny new family housing that looks like a pleasant new suburb. I wondered what it would be like to be a young mother arriving here for the first time. The mountains are beautiful, at least. Would that be a comfort?
At the hospital, there is a row in the parking lot for handicapped parking. Not just three or four spaces, or twelve tucked against the sidewalk for easy access. No. Space after space after space, an entire lot, both sides, marked with fading blue handicapped parking symbols. I was going to count them and felt disheartened, thinking about why there were so many of them.
But you can’t really ignore it. Inside the hospital is a room devoted to Wounded Warrior art. The bulletin boards have numbers to call for wounded warriors and their families. It’s the Army. We’ve been at war for awhile now.
What would that be like, my inner writer wondered? To be the wounded one, the spouse of one, the friend?
In labor and delivery, the nurses are often soldier’s spouses. We had a midwife, competent and wise, who finally delivered a baby who’d been stubborn about making her way into the world. There were lots of women (girls) having babies, lots and lots of them—the floor was efficient and clear-sighted, geared for massive numbers of babies. A veritable factory! I wondered about that, too, what it would be like to be a midwife, to go to work to deliver babies every single day. To participate every single day in that miraculous—or sometimes tragic—but always momentous moment in another person’s life. I wondered what happens if the dad is deployed and the BFF has two babies at home and a deployed husband, too. Lonely, maybe. But maybe a soldier’s wife is tougher than me.
As I was absorbed in the Fort Carson hospital channel, I was also tuning into my own—Morgan’s long labor brought back memories of my own times, one of them birthing the man in the room who tenderly pressed a cold cloth to his wife’s brow. I noted my weariness as it led me down to the cafeteria (is it a canteen here? wondered my writer self) to have an astonishing cup of coffee, where I listened to old men tell stories. I both felt and observed the swift, sharp explosion of awe that swept me when the baby began to make her mewling cries, the intimate recognition that my internal landscape has shifted irrevocably.
As writers, we both watch and experience, and then we transmute all those notes and emotions into stories that then touch others. Detail by gathered detail, we fashion our tales.
Wild, isn’t it?
Have you lately been in a new world or had a powerful new experience? Were you fascinated by some strange landscape? Share it with us, let us tune into your channels for a minute!
Barbara O’Neal is the author of more than a dozen award-winning, bestselling novels, including the runaway bestseller, When We Believed in Mermaids, which has been published in more than 20 countries and spent many months on the Amazon Charts, as well as the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Washington Post bestseller lists. Barbara lives on the beach in rugged Oregon with her husband, a British endurance athlete who vows he’ll never lose his accent and their zoo of cats and dogs. You can find more information on her newsletter and where to find her on social media at barbaraoneal.com.
You’ve made a meaningful story about thinking about stories. A story within a story. Nice work, Barbara. Your world view (writer’s world view) is encouraging and profoundly, universally true. Huzzah!
Glad you find encouragement in my blogs, Alex.
Hi Barbara,
Your take on the Fort Carson base channel is interesting b/c I grew up with a Dad that was career military and for the first 11 years of my life I spent a lot of time on bases. He wasn’t in the Army and we were never at Fort Carson, but the things you describe sound very familiar. The few times I’ve been on a base since my Dad retired, I’ve felt comforted by the familiarity and it brings up memories.
So I guess that’s part of my channel. ;-)
Exactly, Jill. :)
Great post, Barbara. For me, visiting Hong Kong and Kyoto, Japan had that effect. These two places are special and so different from any place I have ever visited. I need to figure out a way to work them into a novel.
That would definitely be intriguing, CG! All those new scents and manners and sights! I find it fills the well and freshens my work even if the place doesn’t actually show up on the page.
I love Christopher Robin’s GCN. :-) For me, because God is omnipresent, I love to explore not only different windows, but different times for each window. It’s one of the reasons I’m fascinated by old houses. We just went with friends to look at an old building they were thinking of buying. It was most recently an antiques store, and had fallen into disrepair.
Built around 1900, it was obviously an old store, with living quarters above. As I stood and in the residence living room, overlooking what is now the Red Arrow Highway, I imagined who lived there, and what manner of horse-drawn vehicles would’ve stopped on one of the nation’s first federally funded roads (the old Detroit-Chicago Road). Who would they have met? What did people stop for? Etcetera, etcetera. Coulda stood there all day, feeling those vibes.
Great post, as always, Barbara!
Absolutely! I love old places–houses, castles, abandoned shacks….they are so full of whispers and tales.
And GCN is one of the funniest things CR has ever said. I was being all philosophical and he popped up with that and I just laughed and laughed. Perfect.
What a lovely post. Congratulations on your new granddaughter!
Often when I’m commuting to work (used to be on the highway, now on the subway) in Boston, I consider that everyone around me has a story all their own, and then I think about how many people there are in the whole world (and maybe on other words? who knows) and, well, my comparatively little mind just boggles at it all. Wild is a good word. :)
I know! It’s layer after layer after layer, and endless segments intersecting and….and…. and….!
This is a great post. I absolutely love it and this topic speaks to me. I am constantly wondering everyone’s stories and I wish there was a way for me to really get into them.
Love, love this post, Barbara
It would be so illuminating and helpful to just turn the dial and be able to tune into someone, somewhere, having THIS day. I guess we kind of do that, in a way, but still.
What a beautiful post, Barbara! You’ve so perfectly captured the magic of what it means to live the writer’s life. Not just to write, but to see the world always through those beautiful (and sometimes heartbreaking) story-colored lenses.
And congratulations on the new granddaughter! She is so lucky to have you in her life!
Oh, it’s me who is lucky. (Trying super hard not to run over to son’s house RIGHT NOW! )
Signed,
Nana
Lovely! I’m so grateful that you shared this experience with us in such detail. Congratulations on the birth of your granddaughter!
This isn’t quite what you were asking, but I did have a realization that I could use imagery from one of my recurring dreams in a new story. It’s a dream house, filled with wild rooms, some of them covered in grass and filled with sun, some of them terrifying. Still haven’t committed to the story, but it’s poking at me more and more, so we’ll see.
Love it!!
Thank you for a lovely post, Barbara. I know because I’m older and have a wealth of life experiences, I don’t think I could be as good a writer as I am today, if I had started years ago. Because I’ve traveled, worked, had children, and on and on, I have more to inject into my characters and scenes than I did at 20.
Patti
Patricia, it’s one of the great things about being a writer that age and experience are a benefit, not a liability. And it just goes on and on and on until–presumably–we are 80 and 92 and 105.
Congratulations to you and yours on the new wee one. I’ve been lucky enough to attend births, and I always feel like I’d earned a peek at infinite mysteries.
New York was a new-to-me world. What astonished me about it, since it seemed so foreign when I landed, was how quickly I adapted. Within a half-day the street vendors left me alone because I’d stopped making eye contact. Bizarre.
You’re a natural, Jan. I can see that.
Great post, as always, Barbara. And congratulations on your new (very blessed) granddaughter!
Last weekend I had strong “nudge” to visit a quaint river town west of the city where I live. As my husband and I drove around, I viewed it through a writer’s eyes–taking notes. Details for a future story? Could be. That’s the beauty (and fun) of writing down random things that jump up and yell “Over here!”
Those nudges are very powerful things, Cindy! Glad you listened.
Beautiful! I felt as if I was there with you.
I find that being in a nursing home gives me that sense of endless stories. We don’t (I feel) appropriately value the stories, the lives, of the elderly, and in a nursing home, there are thousands of untold, untapped stories, all silently bumping into each other at the cafeteria, in the rec room, in the gardens, in the minds of the residents.
Thank you for sharing such a beautiful piece!
Very nice post, Barbara, but I’m going to ask you to do one thing. As a retired Air Force officer, I deal with many older-than-you military retirees and many of them respond to the young soldiers, Airmen, sailors, and Marines–and their spouses–they encounter the same way you did: “they’re children.”
But they’re not children. Oh, they may have been when they or their spouse first entered the military, but they’re not anymore. Many of them are combat veterans. Many of them have seen and experienced things you not only haven’t, you never want to, like seeing a close friend die violently and suddenly right next to you. Some of the spouses have had friends who were suddenly widowed. They’re all grown up now. Very grown up. So my request is that you respect them for who and what they are, not what they appear to be.
If you want to get a sense of what it’s like to be a wounded warrior, let me point you to an amazing short (20 minute), award-winning documentary film called “Wounded Warriors Resilience.” You can watch it here: https://nspyr.com/post/10169479193/woundedwarriorsresilience. I promise you will be stunned and awed by the men and women in this film–and there’s not a child among them. (Well, that’s not quite true; the wife of one of the wounded warriors had a baby not long after the soldier was injured, and the baby’s in the film.)
Thank you for that reminder, Ross. I was being flip and should not have been. They have young faces, but old souls, and I know that. My ex was a Vietnam vet and my d-i-l has been deployed to Afghanistan, and we are surrounded here by the challenges of the widowed and wounded and constantly (endlessly sometimes!) deployed.
I appreciate the correction.
And I want you to know that I’ve written about a wounded warrior in How to Bake a Perfect Life. The impetus for the novel is his dire injuries in Afghanistan.
Thanks, Barbara, and good on you for your work. (And one vet to two others, my thanks to your husband and daughter-in-law for their service.)
The best thing about being a writer is that all travel and all other elective life-experiences can be called research. I was called for jury duty last year and was crushed when they never got to my number.
Congrats on your new grand daughter!
I’ve been that crushed over jury duty, too. What a thrill.
Great post.
I can think of several stories that can come from the places I’ve visited in the past few years. There are stories hidden in the ruins of Pompeii, stories in the ruins of the Roman Forum, stories in the Tuscan countryside.
There are stories about the schoolchildren walking along the road in St. Thomas, shouting to the tour bus, “Hi, we love you!”, stories about the families living in the rundown houses in St. Maarten.
Wow. Thank you for this post. My latest “new” experience was just this last weekend. My cousin and her husband needed some couple time, so we took their three small children for a couple days. My husband and I are both in our mid-twenties, and I can’t speak for my husband, but I am TERRIFIED at the thought of parenthood. Being a mommy is all I’ve ever wanted–and now that it’s a distinct possibility, I’m shaking in fear–I don’t want to have that kind of responsibility, I don’t want to change my lifestyle to accommodate little creatures who need/count on me for everything! It’s…horrifying.
But this weekend, taking care of three children under the age of four, I was blown away by how much love I am capable of feeling. To hear a child asking for a story to be read to them. To look down and see the jubilant smile of a baby who managed to crawl all the way across the room to pat my feet because he loves to be with me, glued to my side, all the time. To go for a walk and feed the ducks at the pond and listen to those miraculous shouts of joy and amazement. To rediscover this gorgeous world we live in, because when a child sees it, it’s glorious. These tiny moments compiled together to make me one of the baby-hungriest people I know because when those kids left to go back home with my fantastic cousin and her husband, they cried. Then I went inside, looked around my empty apartment, sat on my couch, and bawled like, well, like a baby.
It was remarkable, new, and beautiful.
Gorgeous story, Z. Now I got to live in your shoes for a minute.
What a beautiful post Barbara!
We are lucky to be writers because the capacity to see stories everywhere we look isn’t something I would trade. It’s a gift to be endlessly curious and entertained.
Sometimes I’ll be going along, driving/riding, whatever, and suddenly just have the awareness of another person or persons, thinking “I could be them and if I were them, what am I thinking, doing, being?” and it fascinates me that they have no knowledge of me and I of them, yet here we are, so close, beings on this planet, in this space-time event, here now, mere feet from each other – and yet . . .
Fascinating post.
<3
This was so me. So my thought process every day.
I wanted to share something with you. I’m currently writing an article for the local paper about an upcoming choir concert. While interviewing the director earlier today, this is what he said of one of the featured songs:
I thought you might appreciate the idea of God as a storyteller. ;-)
Definitely! In fact, the idea that there are so many stories in the world, even for seemingly mundane people or situations, is complicating my current WIP! It’s my first time balancing a cast this large, and due to the circumstances of the story, they’re pretty much all there, all the time. This made me realize it was going to be doubly important to know each character’s background, personality, quirks–and now they’re all threatening to take over, even though I love my main character! I could tell a version of this story from any of their perspectives and it would offer something unique.
(At least, that’s how it works in my head. I’ve got a lot of work to do to make them all come across so complex on the page.)
What a wonderful, wonderful post! I think writers are some of the most observant people on the planet. And with everyone else absorbed in their smart phones most of the time, thats a good thing. Thanks again for sharing :)
Hi everyone,
Barbara wanted me to let you know that she’s handling a personal situation at the moment, but will be back to respond to comments as soon as she can.
This post makes me think of those scientific explanations of the size of the universe that are meant to put things in perspective. In truth, we don’t need to know how many stars and galaxies there are in the universe when we can just contemplate how many lives and stories there are out there right now (much less all the ones that have passed on and away). Great post! For my part, I spent part of today bringing my niece to a local playground, and I learned all about the world of mothers who gather together and bring their toddlers out for play on weekdays. It was definitely a world I’m not yet familiar with!
I’ve wished so many times I could jump into someone else’s life for a while if only to understand the look on their face or why they’re doing what they’re doing. It would be so fascinating and what great research.
Congratulations on the new addition to your family!
Afraid life got in the way of responding to every post this afternoon–but I read every single one and I love the stories and the wonder in all of them.
So glad to hear everything came out wonderfully, Barbara!
I thought I was the only one with what I call, “Author Personality Disorder” — living life at the same time standing outside it, observing.
I think authors are blessed that way — it’s almost like living 1 1/2 lives at the same time! I so love that.
Thanks for the great post.
Thanks, Barbara, for this wonderful post!
I live in many simultaneous worlds and I love imagining other peoples’ worlds and playing God as I write stories.
I asked my 13-year-old son what he thought about living with a writer, and he replied, “It’s annoying!”
I’ve also become overwhelmed at the width and breadth of stories out there, living and breathing and going about their daily business all around me. The man honking his horn at a slow-moving pedestrian–is he late for a lunchtime rendezvous with his mistress. The girl at the fringe of a boisterous teenage group at the coffee shop. Is her big chance to fit in with the “in” crowd not going so well? So much to see, to hear, to imagine, to write!
Ft. Carson. Well I’m one of those lives you speak of only it’s not now but it was almost 50 years ago. Some how your vision and mine differ with the exception of the guards at the gates. I never got much time to roam the camp.only the surrounding areas on our winter marches through 2 feet of snow or the sounds of machine gun shell whizzing only a few feet over head, making a popping sound.
Oddly there are two things I recall best about Ft. Carson. The first being Colorado Springs itself. One a weekend pass, after being dropped off for some R & R, I decided to walk around and that is exactly what I did. In 3 hours or so I walked around the entire city. Not just through it but literally AROUND it, it was that small. It’s hard to cross the stree in 3 hours now.
And the second thing I recall was the mountains. Being in them on an assault course, I had a brief moment to survey the beauty of them and I remember to this day, I wondered why I was leaning to kill amid all this., It’s still a puzzle. But life goes on.
Thanks for the memories.
I was one of those young wives, too – our first baby was born the day before my husband came home from his submarine deployment. And while my BFF had young children herself, I had another friend whose kids were a bit older and who came to be my labor coach.
I sometimes watch people with a writer’s eye, but I’m more like the other commenter above – I imagine times past. We recently returned from a few years living in Ireland (not Navy!) and probably the place with the most impact was the Skellig Islands. The monks building stone beehive houses more than a thousand years ago, the rituals of their lives, the fishing and hard-scrabble gardening, the boat coming with bread every six months . . . it was quite an experience, and quite a lot to imagine!
Loved the post. Thank you.
Congrats to you and your family! I think it’s been too long since I’ve visited a different world/a different channel. This makes me long for it.
Wonderful post! I enjoy antiques and sometimes a story can be created by touching the furniture or articles from ages past.
We have a world of stories around us and I like to just watch people and imagine what is going on just by their body language and the way they are dressed.
Thanks for reminding me of all the possibilities for writing.