A few nights ago, I had the luxury to fall asleep in front of a fireplace with a book. I lost my place, but it was probably the best sleep I had gotten in weeks. I woke up somewhere around 5 AM to find my father scurrying around the house. He told me that some of the higher-ups at work wanted him in later that morning, late to him being 7 AM. “Half the day’s over at that point,” he said, looking out to his van. At this point, he had already brushed it off, warmed it up, and turned it off to wait until it was late enough for him to leave. Living with him for twenty years now, I’ve been taught what it means to be an early riser, but I’ve also inherited his sleepless nights. While I may not always embrace the waking race with the sun (while his record is nearly flawless), that sliver of insomnia likes to creep. If the exhaustion wasn’t there and I were more productive, I’m sure that I’d embrace it.
He had spent a few hours the day before in the emergency room. His heart was giving him some trouble, but he planned on waiting out the blizzard before doing anything about it. My mother drove him, and while I was at work during their visit, I probably sent enough texts to be considered annoying, assuming the worst and probably adding pressure that he really didn’t need. Though nothing was inherently wrong, so they sent him home with a monitor. While there still aren’t any answers, he seemed pleased that there weren’t any bad ones.
When I made my way into the kitchen to brew some coffee, my dad tugged the neck of his shirt, showing me some patches and wires that were measuring his heartbeat. I saw three of them, each one twisting down his shirt onto a walkie-talkie mechanism that stores every heartbeat like faithful diary. I told him that he was in the process of becoming Robocop or Darth Vader, the next step being flashy headgear. He laughed and began telling me about his experience in the emergency room, recalling quirky, yet horrific details that brought the story to life.
My dad has always been somewhat of a good storyteller. I remember vividly him sharing the tales of his youth, tidbits of being pulled into fights with strangers wielding lead pipes. These stories encompass everything that he’s told me to avoid throughout my life. While the details are all there, it’s only the things that happen that he seems eager to pass on, never his own thoughts. Sometimes I want to stop him, and ask him how he felt about what happened. But when questioned, he’ll add a token emotion like fear or excitement.
I normally don’t give it much attention, but this story in particular I really wanted to stop him to ask, but I didn’t. The story doesn’t start with, “I just listened to this kid die.” No, he broke it down into pieces, telling me everything that happened from where it was necessary. He started in the middle of things, in media res, untrained and natural. He found himself separated from other patients by a curtain. The color isn’t important as much as the separation. On his left, he saw the feet of a family, gathered around their son in probably the worst place he could be spending his eighteenth birthday. To his right, he told me that somebody was being revived after flat-lining, unlike the woman to her right who’s heart didn’t kick back in. Including himself, this story had four patients, only two of them were alive when he left a few hours later. We don’t often wonder about how our hearts feel as they beat on unconsidered, but these anxieties must change in the emergency room.
Separated by the curtain, he heard more of the boy’s family come in. I don’t know which voice the information came from, but he had gotten involved with crystal meth. He described the kid’s father well, or at least his voice. The father told the doctor about how they were going to have fried fish for his birthday, and how he’d lost his other son to electric shock. Some of the details still haunt while I type this. I think it’s in the way he included their screams and tears, thrown at the kid’s body, saying that they warned him that this would happen. My father got really quiet after this part, before he describes his doctor walking in his curtain area and saying that it was a rough day for heart issues. I wanted to stop him to ask how he felt hearing somebody die. But that type of curiosity is too bold and borderline disturbing.
My dad had watched his father pass away a few months ago, and the way he described the scene prompted me to write about it immediately. This backfired because I only had the details to work with, details that weren’t my own. Sometimes what happened isn’t enough for story, at least not the way I wanted to write it. The only emotion he really gave me was that, ‘it was terrible.’ The description of the family behind the curtain was a lot like his recollection of his father’s house. I wanted, or maybe needed, to hear about how this feels and what it has done to him as a person. I want to know his grieving process the way he sees it, not the way I do. I’ve taken more than insomnia from him, and while I may not have the ability to command a story like he can, I think there’s some other links I’m overlooking, like trying to break a wall by looking too hard at another one.
Maybe I’m just being selfish with this whole bit. Sometimes I feel a personal drive to push these stories for the sake of communicating and understanding. I don’t accept that stories are told to pass the time. In a response to one of the criticisms of his plays, I once read a quote where Thornton Wilder said that, “Every novel for sale in a railroad station is the dreaming soul of the human race telling its story.” I don’t think this is only present in books, but I think ‘the dreaming soul’ is ever-present in these little stories I hear in the break room of Chris Luz’s plan to completely revamp The Wizard of Oz. It’s there when I’m listening to my father’s stories. It’s there, but it’s behind those walls. We’re telling our too much of our stories without us. I want to push and understand, but they’re kept hidden. We’re all hoarding ourselves away, some more then others. While it may be as small as denying Oz remake as anything but a byproduct of time. No, it’s too calculated, the individual is too invested. Understanding ourselves through the lens of our truths and our fictions is one of the few ways that we can grow.
Stage Fright 