anecdote

There is a point in the future where even the worst disaster starts to settle into an anecdote.

I would go to parties and say I was an editor, and people, especially women _ and that was important to me back then _ would say, __h, really?_ and raise their eyebrows and look at me a little more carefully. I remember the first party I went to after I became a teacher, someone asked me what I did for a living, and I said, __ell, I teach high school._ He looked over my shoulder, nodded his head, said, __ went to high school,_ and walked away.Once I repeated this anecdote around a big table full of Mexican food in the garden at a place called La Choza in Chicago, and Becky Mueller, another teacher at the school, said that I was a __toryteller._ I liked that. I was looking for something to be other than __ust_ a teacher, and __toryteller_ felt about right. I am a teacher and a storyteller in that order. I have made my living and my real contribution to my community as a teacher, and I have been very lucky to have found that calling, but all through the years I have entertained myself and occasionally other people by telling stories.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

I think it's something like Mr. Peter Sloane and the octogenarians. The other evening Mrs. Sloane was reading a newspaper ans she said to Mr. Sloane 'I see here that another octogenarian has just died. What is an Octogenarian, Peter?' And Mr. Sloane said he didn't know, but they must be very sickly creatures, for you never heard tell of them but they were dying.

After all, this was the place where I__ had my first meaningful conversation with a female, it was the site of a football__ first encounter with my groin, and above all, it was the location where I was first punched in the face by a bully. Somewhere out there, a tooth of mine lay deep within the soil.

It wasn__ enough that I had to worry about playing well and winning the game, but I also had to deal with possibility that one of my teammates could be dragged off the field by the inhabitants of the mental hospital.

[The cats] scamper in front of my legs, causing me to fall and face plant into whatever furniture is closest. They especially like to play this game when I__ carrying piping hot coffee.

Ever since the robot was first invented, there have been people who swear up and down that this marks the first step towards the fall of man _ To be fair, their arguments are backed with scientific fact taken from documentary films such as The Terminator, The Matrix, and RoboCop.

The first way not to shake hands is executed by receiving someone__ hand in yours and proceeding to squeeze it tightly, hurting the other party as if they were responsible for a past death in your family, or your adoption as a child.

Our family was nearly torn apart on several occasions by arguments started when the refrigerator door was open for what my father deemed as __oo long.

A gossip spread a rumor, and became notorious from the deed. The gossip then started a fire beyond their control, and when it spread, the gossip spread the word around, but people just ran away. The gossip died in the fire they started, longing for warmth they could not find or keep when they did. And no one spread the word, about the gossips' death.

It took me a lifetime.

In the middle section of the book Mirabelle breaks into not one, but two houses near Belgravia Books. I had fun scoping these out - checking which windows looked least secure and figuring out how to scale the mews houses to the rear to get her inside. A man came out at one point, 'What are you doing?' he questioned me. 'The thing is, I'm writing a book,' I started with a smile. He waved me off, his hand as wide as a tennis racket. 'Everyone is writing a book, my dear,' he said. Between you and I, it's his house that MIrabelle ends up breaking into.

I remember calling the council's cemetery department to ask about body decomposition in different soil types. Once they had verified that I was a novelist and not a sicko, they were extremely helpful.

Every ounce of his soul tells him this will make a good story to tell his friends__n anecdote in the biography, an incident in the life. But part of the sorrow he feels__nd it is that__omes from the distance he sees between himself and the storytelling, the hole that has ripped open between the here and the there.

My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of __one With the Wind_, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It__ actually one of the things that you live and die for.