I love stories. It's why I played with Barbies until I was in middle school and why I so much love to read. I enjoy having an imagination. I enjoy reading the stories that others have created, and I enjoy creating my own. Stories come naturally to me.
When I was in middle school, I rode the bus home from school with my very bestest friend every day. We rode past this one little bitty house every day, the owners of which were always in the yard. So I named them. I gave them a story and a life (disclaimer: they already had their own story and their own life, but I didn't know what that was, so I made one up for them).
The old man was Noah, Noah Peabody. His wife was Bernadette, and they were high school sweethearts. They had spent their whole lives in Central, SC. Ever since they were married right out of high school, they had lived in that little house that my bus drove past every day. The town changed a lot since they were married, and they watched it change from the comfort of their front porch with a glass of sweet tea.
Noah and Bernadette had one daughter, whose name was Bridget. She went to the same middle and high school that I did, just like her parents had. She left Central as soon as she was old enough to and she only came back one time since, to drop off her baby girl, Penny, with her parents, who took care of Penny when Bridget went back to the city to do her thing. She was just one of those people who couldn't handle life in a small town. Noah and Bernadette were glad to take care of Penny. Bernadette hadn't been the same since Bridget left and she loved having little Penny around to dote on.
Noah's brother, Charlie, also lived with him and Bernadette. He smoked cigarettes at the same time every afternoon on the green two-seated swing in the yard. Charlie didn't have a car and I guess Noah didn't like sharing his, because sometimes (at times other than the daily after-school bus ride) I saw Charlie walking on the sidewalk by the highway. I usually figured that he was walking to Ingles to buy more cigarettes. He also had a beer belly.
Noah and Bernadette had a quite interesting house/yard area. Their house was jam-packed full of stuff. Just stuff. The porch had one of those blue plastic rocking horses on it, along with a lot of other knick-knacks from Penny's babyhood. Sometimes if I drove past their house at night, I could see inside the kitchen, which was old and classic. The cabinets were green and there were droopy lacy curtains around all the windows. The house leaned a little to the right, from the weight of all of the stuff it contained. I decided the reason for all of the stuff (which was really just junk) was because Bernadette was afraid to throw anything away, just in case Bridget ever came back. She would want to be able to show Bridget that she kept everything: that she had never forgotten about Bridget, not even for a second.
There was a small red barn behind the house with no animals in it, just some hay. Behind the barn was a field with a few cows in it, but the cows were old and tired, just like Noah and Bernadette.
Noah was a very small man. He was short and, unlike Charlie, had no belly to speak of. His little head was round and white on top. Bernadette always wore dresses and she was also quite petite. She wore her hair in a tight bun on the very tip top of her head, but I imagined that when her hair wasn't in that bun, it was really long and a little stringy, but in an endearing way if that's possible.
And then there was Penny. She was adorable. Bernadette braided her hair up into pigtails every single morning, and her hair was copper, which was why her name was Penny. She was about four and the whole family loved her. After Charlie was done with his afternoon cigarette(s), Penny liked to sit on his lap and bounce around. She brought joy to everyone.
I had a lot of time to read books in middle school. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot. Instead of hanging out in the cafeteria before school like most people, my three friends and I went to the library every single morning to read. I picked out two books for each day, and I would read those two books in that same day. In each of my classes, I finished my work as quickly as I could and as soon as I was done, I read. I read on the bus up until we got to Noah's house, then I would stare at it and try to absorb as many details about it as I could, to help me elaborate the story in a more detailed manner. I would think about his story for a bit and then go back to reading. When I got home from school, I watched Arthur, the best show ever, then I did my homework and read until it was time to go to bed. I read a lot.
I found myself often annoyed with the characters in these books. They were always so "special" and I felt left out. They had cool characteristics that made them who they were. They had obvious starting and ending points for their stories, whereas every time I tried to think of a distinguished story from my life I got frustrated because there was so much background involved in telling any story from my life. I was jealous of characters because they each had something to clearly define them: a sport or a hobby or an extremely unusual life situation or being psychic. And I knew that I was just that girl with glasses and braces and a mousy Daisy dollop of straight brown hair.
I wanted to be a story but the stories showed me that I didn't have what it took. I even tried: I narrated my life in third person for a year straight. Still I felt like I was too boring to be a story and that made me mad. So when I decided to take this old man who I saw in his front yard every afternoon and assign him a life story, I decided to make him more of a normal person than the people I read about every day. I gave him a story that I thought was fitting for Central, SC. I made him how he was because I wanted to prove that a character doesn't have to be an exceptional person; a character just has to be a person (or sometimes a frog, but in this case, a person).
I took this old man and he became Noah, Noah Peabody. If you take the "ah" from his first name and the "Pea" from his last name, he becomes "Nobody." I did that on purpose. I was feeling bitter at all literature for making all of its characters so dang unique, so I made mine a nobody. I gave him a cool story and a simple, contented life. And it worked.
And I reached a conclusion: People are stories, even if they're real people who haven't done cool things in their life. And I was a story girl.
Love,
Lauralicious
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