Posted by
AudiR10TDI on Friday, October 13, 2006 7:21:26 PM
Friday, October 13, 2006 7:19 PM
TORONTO (October 13, 2006) -- Today a bunch of us motorsport journalists were talking about 'what to talk about' in our trackside endeavors. What do people want to hear? What do they want to know?
I am a person who collects stories, and I have discovered, as you probably have too, that everybody has one, or more than one, and that often the way to hear them is to sit down and say "Tell me your story." When I was a whole lot younger and only beginning to find out that being everybody's sister or auntie isn't totally a bad thing, I used to hang around with hockey players; I had a best friend who was a Magnet, and she'd draw them in, but at the end of the evening I'd have a table full and I'd be listening to stories. "Where you grew up," I'd prompt, "wasn't much like this [Los Angeles]" and off he'd go. Once they all realized that I wouldn't repeat a word that would get back to hit a guy in the face, it was amazing the stories I heard. My eyesight isn't good, and of course the average Place To Meet Hockey Players wasn't well lighted, so I learned to pick up a lot from the tone of voice (and enjoy the accents too). I've carried a lot of this over into my motorsport work, and I stand amazed at how much people can reveal of themselves to a person who will take the time to sit and pay attention. This one listens with almost painful attention to every question; that one keeps his sunglasses on because -- his voice tells me -- he's afraid to meet my eyes. This one's in agony lest I ask that elephant-in-the-room question; that one tries to trap me by reversing the question and shooting it back at me -- and can't hide the rueful grin when I catch it and toss it back. And I am fascinated by stories of home and family and loss and uncertainty and determination, of struggle and love and pride, that people will tell a stranger because that stranger wants to hear their story.
When I was a little bit over the Hockey Player stage, I did a lot of travelling by bus and I found that people who ride buses were (pre-cellphone) happy to chatter away to strangers about where they were going, where they had been, what they had seen and learned, who they'd left behind and who they were going to. Bitterness, wistfulness, longing, sorrow, tiredness, dutiful resignation, laughter and hope run deep in people who ride the bus, and the ear of a stranger who says "What do you know about this part of the country" or "Things have certainly changed since we were young" will bring it all out in the open. You won't hear this kind of stuff from most people on a plane, although when I flew back from Houston recently I had a three hour conversation with a young Englishman who was coming back to my town to enter University and who shared my passon for cars.
Mama's people are from Alabama and have lived there since the 1600s and every year there's "Cousins' Day" when all the home folks get together at Auntie's house and talk about how they are related to each other. In this company I have no name -- I am "Harold and Clarice's Oldest Girl". And in this company all it takes to get a story is "When you were young, things were different," and you're off on a journey you will never read in books unless you write them yourself. Mama and Daddy lived in a house that had been the family home (of another branch of the family) for a long time -- they moved into it when Uncle Bud (my great-uncle actually) passed away at 93 -- and Great-Aunt Mollie went through the house with me one day and told me vividly about what the house was like when she grew up there, 80 years before, and what she knew about what the house was like when her Mama and Daddy were young.
My nephew, who has grown up in a cyberworld I wear like the outsized jackets racing teams make 'small' for men, used to ask me what television and computers were like when I was young and was astonished to hear that all we had was radio, and the radio was the size of Nana's television set. A 22 year old girl who came to work in our office had neither used nor even seen a typewriter and asked "How do I input data in this?" And my neice saw a mobile made of old 45 RPM records and said "Look, Auntie! Disks!" And all the kids, who are now teenagers and twentysomethings, are wide-eyed at the stories of World War II that Grandad tells, and at the photos of him going off to war when he was younger than they are now.
And as I age (and begin to admit it) I am beginning to realize that to these kids I am my Great-Aunt Mollie with things to tell them that will seem just that long ago. (My sisters' kids do not believe that their mothers attended a two-room schoolhouse until the late 1950s. This to them is Little House on the Prairie stuff.) And if you give them the chance, the kids will listen to what you have to tell them -- the stories that are better than anything they'll read in modern books (which seem to be mainly about either sex or vampires).
The world is full of stories, and everybody you meet has a story to tell. Listen to them all, even those you may think seem dull and ignorant -- because everyone in the world has something to tell that you will never hear anywhere else.
Don't be afraid to ask anybody you meet "Tell me your story." You may be the only person who ever did, and it's way better than TV.