Hello, and welcome to the 324th episode of "Greg Tulonen Secrets."
This happened a long time ago. I was in my car, stopped at a traffic light, and I noticed in my rearview mirror that the man in the car behind me, alone behind the wheel, was having some kind of fit. Not a seizure, but a full-on eruption of rage. He was screaming and punching his dashboard hard enough to make his whole car sway.
This man was surely unaware he had an audience. Ensconced as he was in his skin of steel and glass, his outburst was presumably intended to be wholly private. Ensconced as 𝘐 was, and enjoying a privacy this man only imagined himself to have, I studied the rearview's reflection of him coming unglued.
As I watched, I wondered what had gotten him so upset. I recalled that a few blocks back, I'd driven past a funeral breaking up. Maybe that funeral was part of his story. Maybe the departed had been his father, or his wife, or his child. Forced to greet the guests with somber calm for the duration of the service, he was finally allowing himself to unleash the full force of his fury and sorrow.
Or maybe he just hated red lights.
The light turned green. I drove straight, and the guy behind me turned left, the brief interaction between us now complete. It wasn't really an interaction, though, because it wasn't reciprocal, but it had been a 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, a suggestion of a story—or part of a story—passed, however unintentionally, from him to me.
This man has come to mind many times over the years. I'll never know his whole story, obviously, but that would be true even if we hadn't been strangers, or if I'd initiated an actual interaction with him that day (which would have been crazy).
Suppose for a moment I had gotten out of my car, walked back to his car, knocked on his window, and asked him what the matter was. Suppose he 𝘩𝘢𝘥𝘯'𝘵 told me straight off to mind my own business. Suppose he 𝘩𝘢𝘥𝘯'𝘵 switched from punching his dash to punching me in the neck. Suppose he'd said, "Meet me at that bar across the street. I'll tell you all my troubles." And suppose we'd done just that. Suppose we'd sat at the bar drinking beers and eating warm salted nuts as this man sifted through his rage to articulate his problems. What then? Then would I truly understand?
I've thought a lot about the inadequacy of language, which is a strange thing for a writer to admit. Adrienne Rich called language "a map of our failures," because language can never fully do what it was designed to do, which is to act as a kind of telepathy, a transfer of thought from one brain to another. It's an imperfect vehicle, an approximation, and it relies on a collaboration between the speaker (or writer) and listener (or reader), both of whom must bring something to the exchange for it to have any chance of approaching success.
Here's something I didn't tell you: While I was watching this man have his fit, I was mostly thinking about an instance a few years earlier, when I was doing the exact same thing: driving, screaming, and punching the dash. I had just learned (in a mall, at a payphone, from an answering machine) of a dear friend's death, and more than anything, I wanted to be home, alone, my body curled into a fist, 𝘯𝘰𝘵 behind the wheel of a car.
I can't imagine communicating that pain to anyone else. There just aren't any words. But if I actually had spoken to the man that day, it's likely I would have relied on that painful memory to help myself comprehend the depth of his grief. A collaboration between us to achieve understanding.
In Richard Brautigan's short story, "The World War I Los Angeles Airplane," the narrator receives a call while his wife is out. It's his wife's brother, calling with the news that their father has died. The narrator muses:
I tried to think of the best way to tell her that her father was dead with the least amount of pain but you cannot camouflage death with words. Always at the end of words somebody is dead.
This is true, but what if you don't want to camouflage death? What if you want to strip it naked and expose it to everyone? Can words carry the day? Maybe, but probably not completely.
Okay, maybe death is too enormous. What about something smaller? A bathroom sign. A Klondike Bar. A napkin dispenser. A Bobby Orr t-shirt. A pen. Can I communicate these objects to you, conveying their significance, using only words?
I can trick you, maybe. I can inspire you to conjure up your own images of these things. I can describe the pen as bullet-shaped and collapsible, able to write upside-down, used by astronauts. Can you see it? What if I told you that it's heavier than your average pen, like a lump of lead or a fishing sinker? Can you imagine holding it in your hand? What if I told you this: It was a Fisher Space Pen, first introduced to me by my friend Jeff, the one whose death was revealed to me in the answering machine message mentioned above. Jeff had a Fisher Space Pen himself, and he carried that pen with him everywhere, tucked into a small leather notebook. I remember he once leant it to a guy paying his bill at a restaurant, and as the guy handed it back to him, he proclaimed, "That is one smooooth ride, my man." He wasn't wrong. I got myself a Fisher Space Pen just like Jeff's, and I loved it right up until the day I lost it. I mentioned all this in passing to Kate, shortly after we first met, and for my thirtieth birthday (a year later), she gave me a replacement. She'd hunted it down on the internet, you see, back before Google was around to make such a task easier. Back then, Yahoo! only returned useful results if you spelled "spacepen" as one word, which isn't even how it's spelled by the Fisher Pen people.
Anyway, that pen was the first gift she ever gave me.
Does the pen seem different now? More real? Are you bringing your own memories of pens, romantic gifts, and departed friends to the mix? I hope so. You're probably not thinking of the exact same pen I'm thinking of, but this is a collaborative conjuring trick, not genuine telepathy.
For me, the purest way to facilitate this trick is through stories. I'm a sucker for stories, and can't resist the allure of the narrative. It doesn't matter how good or bad a story is. The pull of "what happens next?" is a force I often can't resist. If I'm flipping channels and happen to catch thirty seconds of an old "Charles In Charge," I can become overwhelmed with the need to know if Charles will defeat his fear of public speaking in time to help his friend Buddy, who's lost his voice. (Spoiler alert: He will.)
If you've ever told me a story about your life, it's very likely I remember it. I remember stories people tell me better than I remember stories from my own life (hard as that may be to believe, based on the nature of this series). Ask my friend Jeff McMahan, who still gets freaked out whenever I quote back to him stories he told me only once, nearly forty years ago. I just love stories of all kinds. They're how I process the world.
Ultimately, our understanding of each other comes from the stories we experience together and from the stories we tell each other about ourselves. If you know me primarily through Facebook, you may have a fuller understanding of who I am through these "secrets" I've been posting over the past few years. But even if you do have a fuller understanding, you'll never have a complete picture. You can't. These secrets have been approximations, my best effort to get you to see and hear and feel what I once saw and heard and felt. But you may have missed the mark on some of them, or I may have missed the mark, and your understanding of what happened may differ significantly from mine. I think of the T.S. Eliot poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in which he laments:
That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.
Every communication is an opportunity for miscommunication, but I think we've succeeded, you and I, far more than we've failed.
At least, I hope we have.
Okay, so you might have noticed that this is not a typical Greg Tulonen Secret. For one thing, it's quite a bit longer, and for another, we've strayed fairly far from the original anecdote. That's because this is the third season finale of Greg Tulonen Secrets.
I don't know if there will be a fourth season, but if there is, it's not likely to come for some time. For a long while there, I didn't think there would be a season three, and even when I started season three, I didn't think I could keep it going for very long. That's why I decided to release twice a week rather than every other day (like season one) or every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (like season two). But season three turned out to be the longest season yet, by a considerable margin, with a whopping 160 secrets shared (more than twice as many secrets as season one).
To make a long story short (too late!): this may turn out to be the SERIES finale of Greg Tulonen Secrets.
If it does, so be it.
All together, the entire saga is more than 90 thousand words, which is shorter than "War and Peace," but longer than "A Farewell to Arms." Not exactly something that can be absorbed in one sitting, but I hope at least some of you have made the slog all the way to the end. I mean otherwise, what's the point?
One last thought before I go: You may be wondering, is Greg Tulonen really all out of secrets?
Well, I might be back for a fourth season someday, but there will always be secrets that are too private for me to share, or too sad, or too boring, or too embarrassing, or too shameful.
And then there are those secrets that can never be shared, because the words I'd need to convey them do not exist.
This has been "Greg Tulonen Secrets." Thank you for reading.