WHEN AN EYE FOR AN EYE LEAVES EVERYONE BLIND

 

A dear friend of mine was hurt, badly hurt, by the actions of colleagues who should have had her back.

At the same time, she was going through challenging family health issues, seemingly unrelated.

 

Her professional injuries were doozies. Her personal challenges were met with courage and steadfastness. She was too busy to think how to respond to her colleagues’ betrayal. There were other things to face and no room to digest their treachery. 

 

But once she came up for air, she, a gifted writer, devised a literary revenge of sorts. She would write a fictional novel about what happened.

 

She enlisted my help in brainstorming the characters and the style she might take. She was on fire, feeling creative and alive again. Ideas were pouring out. “What do you think about this?” and “I just thought about that” came pinging over the transom in rapid pace.

 

I was happy she was finding herself again. Writers process and digest through stories.

 

I was less sure about the vengefulness I felt gushing out of her.

 

I thought about the times I was done wrong. I didn’t want to hurt those who did it, but I did entertain thoughts of how, somehow, they’d be hurt and know how it feels.

 

I thought about how real healing has come to me. Only when I truly began to wish well for the ones who made themselves my (or my people’s) enemies, and gone to do us harm, did I find peace.

 

Real healing requires nothing less. An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.

PEACE.

THE BEST and the NOT-SO of HUMANITY

 

Not long ago, I witnessed the best and the not-so-great aspects of human beings in the space of five minutes.

 

Trigger warning: This true account mentions people’s races because they go counter to unfortunate stereotypes, and thus belong in the telling.

 

I was standing in Safeway on the checkout line, the only one open that mid-morning, when I realized someone was holding up the line. I’m a bit hard of hearing, so I couldn’t tell what they said. To me, three customers behind, it appeared like a customer was arguing with the cashier.

 

That customer was an old Chinese man. He could have been in his nineties. Next to him stood his wife, smiling blithely a sort of beatific smile. I couldn’t figure out if she agreed with her husband or just didn’t want to contradict him.

 

Ten minutes later, and the line hadn’t moved at all. The old man was still there, saying something to which the cashier also said something.

 Right behind the Chinese couple were two black ladies in their forties. One of them, her face so laden with makeup it looked theatrical to me, (eyelids painted in glittery gold and the longest artificial eyelashes) and the other lady only slightly less so, were talking to each other about this ‘n that. Their conversation didn’t seem connected to the goings on in front of them. Behind them, a nicely dressed white man in his fifties stood with a small number of items already packed into his bag.

 

Behind the man was yours truly. The line didn’t move.

 The line behind me grew exponentially. It now began to resemble the ticket line to a blockbuster movie, curling around the next aisle.

Five minutes more, and the man with his bag of groceries just stormed out in a huff past the old couple and walked out with his groceries, not bothering to pay. Mind you, he wasn’t one of those thieves who intended not to pay. He had spent fifteen minutes in line already. He was angry. Perhaps he felt Safeway owed him for his waiting.

 

I was frustrated also but wouldn’t think to not pay for something I was taking from the store.

 

The two well-painted ladies then turned their attention to the goings on in front of them. The one with the golden eyelids asked the cashier, “how much is it?” and some conversation ensued. Because of my lousy hearing, I only heard bits of it. But I did hear the number, "Eighty-four dollars and fifty-seven cents.”

 

The cashier then repeated to the old man, “she is paying for you.” He didn’t seem to fully understand, and his wife with the beatific smile seemed to understand even less. The cashier had to say it over and over. Then, the old couple left with their groceries.

 

I asked the two ladies what it was about. “He was short,” said the less painted one. “His debit card kept saying he was short, and he tried running it over and over.”

 

“You paid the difference?” I asked.

 

“We both did. We split it,” she said, pointing to her friend.

 

“You did something good,” I said. I was so pleased to have stood next to them, as if their goodness would spill some rays on me.

 

“Yeh, honey-child. God sees all,” said the golden-lidded lady.

 

I don’t think anyone ever called me “honey-child” before. I felt utterly blessed.

 

In the car, I found myself tearing in gratitude that I got to witness the beautiful ladies (especially after the entitled man who walked off without paying) and that Oakland, my embattled and economically challenged city blessed with all races and colors, is still a place where we get along and then some.

 

As they say on Netflix, this is a True Story.

MEMOIRES

 

Memoirists have a special challenge: tell a good story, driven by themes which must not overwhelm the plot.

My late father was urged to write a memoire/autobiography, because his life’s story encompassed the momentous events of Jewish history of the 20^th century. He survived the Holocaust (ghetto and concentration camp) to go to what was then Palestine, and fight to establish the Jewish state of Israel. He was critically wounded in the battle for Jerusalem. He was part of a group that established a kibbutz. He went on the represent Israel in cultural aspects in France and Argentina.

 

Even one of these chapters would have made a poignant book. He was an academic historian, and wrote beautifully, having had poems published. He was the one to tell his story, right?

 

But he refused to write his memoires. He told me that people who write their life story inevitably lie, embellish, or seek justification.

“Fiction allows the writer to tell much deeper truths,” my father told me.

 

When I first wrote the story that would evolve into a published novel for middle grades, it was half biographical. By the time it took its final form, the details were more fiction than fact, and I submitted it as such. I was told by one editor who wanted to take it to acquisitions that it would be more likely to be acquired as a memoire. I, like my father, turned that down. The story had left the honest facts of my life’s story long before, in order (as my father would have put it) to tell the deeper truth and tell it as a better, tighter story.

One blurb I got referred to The Voice of Thunder as “fictionalized biography.” Fair enough.

 

Memoirists have the advantage that when submitting their story, they present it as true, and it is easier to sell it that way. But keeping it true while making it tight and compelling is a hard hill to climb.

See this post about the special challenges of seeking to traditionally  publish memoires.