Published in The Siskiyou, February 13, 2006

A girl walks into Albertson’s on her deceased father’s birthday only to hear the song he used to sing to her playing over the loudspeaker: “I just called to say I love you.” A baby born in Montana and another born the exact same day in California meet twenty-three years later in Washington and fall in love. A nineteen-year-old thinks of canceling a date because of feeling under the weather. In the end she decides to go, later discovering that a cancellation would have stopped the young man from having the courage to ask her out again. It is a date which ultimately produces four children, eight grandchildren, and twenty years of marriage.

These three stories are entirely real, leaving their protagonists to wonder if life is, in fact, more than just a random set of events.

I’m not sure that I believe in fate or a predetermined destiny. I don’t believe in guardian angels and, while I am a Scorpio to the “t”, I don’t put much stock in astrology. Yet, I’m sure we’ve all had moments where we’ve felt like Jim Carrey’s character in the Truman Show, mere puppets on a stage whose lives seem scripted by an outside hand.

I often chronicle my life from the time I met Joy in 7th grade. If we hadn’t become best friends, I wouldn’t have made the friends I did in high school, which means I wouldn’t have had the crush that I did in college, which means I wouldn’t have met my ex-boyfriend through working with my crush over the summer, which means I wouldn’t have gone to the college my ex recommended, which means I wouldn’t have met my ex-husband, which means I wouldn’t have gotten divorced and decided to go back to school at SOU. And of course life can be chronicled much farther back than that, all the way back to the beginning of time.

Whether we have control over our lives or whether they are controlled by forces outside of ourselves, all lives seem to tell a story. Some stories are tragedies, others are comedic, and most contain a combination of the two. But no matter what type of life a person has had, I believe every human being could write a memoir that would capture the interest of the entire world in a way that every other human being could not. While I admit that memoirists such as Frank McCourt and Maya Angelou have had very unique lives, it’s not so much the lives they have led that keep me turning the pages. Above all, it’s the humanity. It’s the way that every story presents the world through an entirely different lens, and the way the events of that story unfold to create a patchwork, each piece connected to every other piece, creating a beautiful picture.

The above statement may sound corny, but it’s undeniably true. We watch TV because of the stories. We read novels because of the stories. We talk on the phone for hours because of the stories. We get up each day because each day is one more page in our own memoir, written by an invisible hand.

Copyright © 2006 Shannon Luders-Manuel