I thought I'd said all there was to say...or...the thing about my knees

I had a rewarding conference session with my Small Writing Group yesterday. Liz and Larry read over a narrative piece I wrote about an evening with my husband's family--a fish fry at a Morton building in the boonies interrupted by Ryan's cousin driving up in an old, pimped out school bus he uses as his main mode of transportation. I thought the bus was the thing, what my story was about, but Larry and Liz pointed out so many other colorful stories related to the characters there that night that I could have included and expanded on. I want to use the piece with my kids next year and show them how I revised it using my peer's comments, how the piece went in directions I hadn't planned on, how the story was not dramatic and traumatic (I read a lot of near-death fender bender and bike wreck narratives) but made for a worthwhile and entertaining read.

I love to write about interesting characters or quirky situations I have encountered--I love to hear similar stories from my friends. Perhaps you could post here about someone you've met or a situation you found yourself in that was strange or odd or unexpected.

What my students often remember from my class is a story I tell them about a man I tutored in the Writing Center when I was a sophomore at Drury. He was about 10-12 years older than I, and took to visiting me often because he thought I was easy to talk to, I guess. He asked me out a few times (once, in particular, to come to a masquerade party at his mother's house, where he still lived) but I always told him I had a boyfriend. He still thought we had a connection, though, and one day dramatically revealed to me that he had been married before and had a two-year-old son--he wondered if, me being as young as I was, I would be ready to become a mother to his child if things went the way he planned...Another time I was wearing a denim skirt and sweater and he told me I had the "cutest knees" he had ever seen. He waited outside the library on Valentine's Day, calling to me with a "psssst" from a used Linclon he had borrowed from a friend. He gave me a rather intimate poem he had written (about my "smell"--not my perfume but the smell of my skin) with a epilogue reading: "P.S. Yes this poem was wrote by me, especially for you." Obviously the hours in the writing lab hadn't been about the grammar for him.

When I found him waiting for me outside the library yet again a week or two later, asking me to do something that weekend, I finally got the guts to be firm and told him, "I'm not going out with you Saturday. I'm not going out with you ever, and I need you to quit asking me." He backed away slowly and said the weirdest thing anyone has ever said to me: "Okay. Okay. I was a hunter. You were my deer. The hunt is off!" And away he went. I only saw him one other time after that, when I was locked out of my dorm and beckoned to a security guard in the distance to come over and help me in. It was him. He had been hired right after the Valentine poem. Kids always remember that story.

Why don't you post one, too? Maybe it will be the beginning to a great piece or give you something to journal about. Some juicy material...

Hayley