So Many Untold Stories

Everything has a story. I see a ship out at sea, sitting on the horizon, and I wonder what is going on inside. What the crew are doing, what sort of lives do they have waiting at home? So many untold stories are inside there. I look up and see an airplane, that tiny sliver of silver high up in the sky. So many people aboard; what are they doing, where are they going, what are they thinking about at that moment? Are any of them looking out their window, wondering about the people on the ground and what those people are doing? So many untold stories were up there.



I was on a train to Tampa a few years ago, gazing out the window, taking photos of the things I saw. Some things passed by too quickly to snap. At one point we were passing a large field beside the tracks when I noticed a red Firebird in the middle of it. I don’t recall the year or much about it, except that it looked worn and unmaintained. There might have been no engine in it for all I knew, but I had no way of making that determination. I grew curious about it. Whose was it? How did it get into the middle of the field, and why was it left there? I also wondered how many others aboard that train and others like it spotted that Firebird; how many shared the same curiosity about it. Catching sight of that car wasn’t the same as seeing a famous landmark or a particular event, but regardless potentially hundreds if not thousands of people each year shared the same chance as I of catching sight of that abandoned car, a car with an untold story
When we rode through Lakeland I thought it very odd that all the streets were empty. There was no traffic, no people walking around. It wasn’t too early in the day so I don’t have any idea why the city that day seemed like a ghost town but there was a story to tell there, I’m sure.

There is a line of trees outside of where I used to work, and one tree in particular had caught my eye when I daydreamed out the windows.The foliage was full and thick, with what looked like clumps of green where the leaves seemed to be thicker than in other areas. It was just a tree, one among millions across the surface of this world, but that one reminded me of the tiny trees with plastic foliage clumped together that dotted the landscape of my HO-scale train set I had as a child.

(An HO-scale tree. ^ Not the actual tree I had in my train set but one just like it.)

My father had gotten me involved and interested in toy trains, a hobby he equally enjoyed. The train-set sat atop a flat wood board which itself sat atop a pool table when it wasn’t being used, in a spare room in my house that was my playroom. I had a cousin with a bad leg, and once when we were playing pool he tripped and fell so hard against the wall that the plaster broke and his body fell into the space between the walls, causing a gaping hole in the formerly white smooth wall surface. When my father yelled up from downstairs asking what that thud was, I yelled back: “Larry just fell through the wall!”
My father was not too happy about that.

So you see, that tree outside the window of my old job was a storyteller, and those were the stories it reminded me of.


I challenge you to look out your window and tell me what you see. Does it have meaning to you; is there a story there to be told?