Tue Sep 07, 2004 1:17 am
True Tales of (TLR) Life..
not q what you may think it's going to be, this thread.
recently I was fortunate enuff to read an excellent book, the best I've read in a long while now, called "True Tales of American Life" by Paul Auster. It isn't a novel, it's a collection of short stories and anecdotes collected from material submitted to the National Radio Project in recent years. Ordinary people write in with incidents from their lives that are memorable; joyous, tragic, terrifying, bizarre, profound, or downright unbelievable, the point being it had to be something that had made such an impression that it had never been forgotten by the person relating the story. Things like the mother who sold her wedding ring during the Depression to buy new trousers for her son so that he could go to his band parade, or the woman who found her mother's missing antique china on the very last stall at a flea market she went to on impulse, or the story of how a Ku Klux Klan member's beloved dog rushed out into the street during the annual KKK parade and unmasked his owner as the whole town looked on. Some are mysterious, like the story of a woman who watched a white chicken walk purposefully down a street in Portland, Oregon, hop up some porch steps, knock on the door, and calmly enter the house." Stuff like that. (in America the book is called "I Thought My Father Was God.."
So I was wondering? what stories do we have her on TLR that would fit the same criteria. Here's one that comes to mind for me..
- When I was a kid my folks rented our television, people did back then. when it went wrong an engineer would come out to fix it. one time an engineer came out and my folks had gone out, leaving me on my own. the engineer, a grubby old man, fixed the telly quickly and said that it ahd been a nice easy job, just an adjustment. When my dad came back i told him what the engineer had said but not verbatim, I actually said "it was so easy I could have done it myself" which my dad then thought was what the engineer had said. He phoned the rental company and complained. a few years later, i saw a picture of the engineer in the local rag, vandals had burnt down his home, which was a grotty leaky caravan in a field where he'd been forced to live since.. losing his job as a tv repairman some years previously.
I'd never thought about it until that moment. I'd got this bloke sacked, in all probability, with my big stoopid mouth, and by consequence reduced him to living in this miserable squalid state. I felt, and still feel, terribly guilty about that.
Edited by - Radio Free Tawakalnistan on 9/7/2004 5:10:11 AM
recently I was fortunate enuff to read an excellent book, the best I've read in a long while now, called "True Tales of American Life" by Paul Auster. It isn't a novel, it's a collection of short stories and anecdotes collected from material submitted to the National Radio Project in recent years. Ordinary people write in with incidents from their lives that are memorable; joyous, tragic, terrifying, bizarre, profound, or downright unbelievable, the point being it had to be something that had made such an impression that it had never been forgotten by the person relating the story. Things like the mother who sold her wedding ring during the Depression to buy new trousers for her son so that he could go to his band parade, or the woman who found her mother's missing antique china on the very last stall at a flea market she went to on impulse, or the story of how a Ku Klux Klan member's beloved dog rushed out into the street during the annual KKK parade and unmasked his owner as the whole town looked on. Some are mysterious, like the story of a woman who watched a white chicken walk purposefully down a street in Portland, Oregon, hop up some porch steps, knock on the door, and calmly enter the house." Stuff like that. (in America the book is called "I Thought My Father Was God.."
So I was wondering? what stories do we have her on TLR that would fit the same criteria. Here's one that comes to mind for me..
- When I was a kid my folks rented our television, people did back then. when it went wrong an engineer would come out to fix it. one time an engineer came out and my folks had gone out, leaving me on my own. the engineer, a grubby old man, fixed the telly quickly and said that it ahd been a nice easy job, just an adjustment. When my dad came back i told him what the engineer had said but not verbatim, I actually said "it was so easy I could have done it myself" which my dad then thought was what the engineer had said. He phoned the rental company and complained. a few years later, i saw a picture of the engineer in the local rag, vandals had burnt down his home, which was a grotty leaky caravan in a field where he'd been forced to live since.. losing his job as a tv repairman some years previously.
I'd never thought about it until that moment. I'd got this bloke sacked, in all probability, with my big stoopid mouth, and by consequence reduced him to living in this miserable squalid state. I felt, and still feel, terribly guilty about that.
Edited by - Radio Free Tawakalnistan on 9/7/2004 5:10:11 AM
.
). So one day I confronted my boss with this and suprisingly he felt the same. So he fired him almost immediatly!
But of course it's a grimy Northern town like many others, nothing special. I was still slightly relieved to get away and paranoically went for health checks after. And I've never been back (though not fopr any other reason than there is no reason to go)