Today I found myself on a train. I have never been on a train before and I really do not plan on too many more trips on one after my ride. There was so many people all rushing to board and to find the best seats. It was like watching organized chaos unfold in the most mundane way possible.
While I was on this trip, I noticed myself looking out the window, watching what passed by the view of my seat’s window on the way home. I started to wonder what it would be like for the Wall’s family (throw back I know) always moving from place to place with no set home. As the train passed through the farm land with the small houses of the people who own the farms I began to wonder who lives there and about their lives.
Were they like Alison Bechdel and her father, with people struggling with the concept of masculinity, or were they like Jeanette Walls and her family, struggling to make ends meet in a world that doesn’t value the life of an eccentric nomad with no means to pay for goods?
It was a long ride full of deep thoughts for me. I imagined one house had a small family where the parents spent the day tending the cows that surrounded their small home, making milk products to sell at the local farmers market not unlike Rosemary Walls with her art, with two small children, leaving to go to school every morning and returning to the house late afternoon to do their homework at the dining room table while their father cooks dinner only made complete by the milk from the cows fresh from earlier in the day.
While this imaginary life for the people who lived in this small house may be the furthest thing from the truth, I do believe there is some beauty in imagining the lives of those around you.
I completely agree with the idea in beauty in making stories for those around you. Everyone and everything has a story and it makes people who make stories for them, like us a type of detective. Maybe a random teenager also riding the bus had an old pink purse, and the story it inspired is one of her brother giving it to her when she was younger, as a gift. She would use it early in the morning, like all the girls did in the city, to stylishly hold the milk she brought back from the barn. Now she is riding the bus to her brother’s college. As she nervously prepared she made sure not forget his gift from years earlier, because it reminded her of how safe and comfortable he had made her feel in their adolescence. Though the stories may not be true, if they contain a deeper truth about ourselves, that can make them true, in a sense, and that’s where I find true beauty anyway.
I typed out a comment, and my internet connection stopped it from posting. I guess I’ll have to chock that one up to technological difficulties. The jist of it was that I find beauty in making stories for others as well. It’s almost the whole reason I’ll talk to someone, to learn their story. I usually find that I liked the story I made up in my head more than my pursuits into who people actually are though. I think I don’t like their true stories as much because there’s less grandeur, and it’s a melancholy beauty that’s found in the truths of actual stories, their harder for me to pick out. So sometimes it’s easier to find the truths I’m actually seeking in the stories I make up.
Wait, nevermind. I think I may just be dumb and I obviously don’t use technology often.
What a lovely story and reflection on stories!