Popular Culture Review Vol. 26, No. 1, Winter 2015 | Page 115

Apparently, the D.A. or the prosecutor liked the story as well. There is a reason a man or a woman finally tells a personal story some ten or twenty - or fifty - years later. Of course our memories are quirky things; who knows why we retain what we do, and why we forget? Obviously, some experiences stay with us forever - first love, death of a parent, etc. But there are also many experiences which stay with us because they are unresolved in our minds, because we know there is a story, but its meaning is still unclear. I have a poem I’ve written called The New Camera about taking a photo with a Polaroid camera and pulling the negative to the light and waiting not sixty seconds but fifty years for the exposure to become a clear image. I’m not sure why Gordie chose his story about falling from the bus, but I imagine there was some irony that stayed with him, the nuns in effect rewarding him for doing something wrong (hanging onto the back of the bus). But whatever the reason, I saw in Gordie a good-naturedness, laughing at himself and understanding that our experiences in youth sometimes entertains us for a long time. The prosecutor saw it otherwise. As I said, I was driving home from my office on a beautiful summer afternoon. I was feeling good because earlier that day I brought several senior citizens whose narratives we published in a little booklet to a junior high school so they could share their stories and interact with the students. When eighty year-old Sarah McClellan read her story about bringing the corn to a gristmill in Mississippi on the back of a mule when she was twelve years old, the students began asking questions. Sarah's story was about how there was an "advantage” to being a country girl, no matter how hard the life was or how much fear she had of the snakes in the branches in the trees she passed under on the mule - because she "knew, I mean knew what we ate, knew it from the ground that it came from. And we knew what we wore, from the cotton in our hands to the corn sack made into a party dress.” “Yes, we knew," Sarah added, where everything we needed came from. It was our world around us, and the hard thing was simply the respect we gave to our daily bread.” This was an important story to pass on to a generation whose materialistic needs appeared magically every day, although I remember the first question from the students following the story: “How much allowance were you given a week?” Sarah laughed and nodded her head. “Not a penny,” she replied. Speaking of money, that’s what got my friend Gordie in trouble - greed!