The Ancient Mariner at O'Hare
_Casual The Ancient Mariner, at O'Hare Iused to think that stories were mostly lies, chunks of experience sanded down too neatly to be believed. Every tale I've ever told has run a little smoother...
...But somewhere in experience there still exists the reason stories want to go the way they do...
...But Auden knew what every poet since Homer has known: "that the gods spin unhappiness and evil things to mortals so that they may be able to tell the tales and sing the songs...
...No one chooses calamity, but just to sit and listen a while in airport bars or coffee shops is to know that nearly everyone is willing to have lived through it, to have a story left to tell...
...After watching that boy and that old man in tweed, I have begun to wonder whether it isn't the other way around—whether we don't have lives for the sake of having stories...
...And no matter how hard I try, I can't seem to get away from him...
...The tired boy was miserable, of course, because he's living it now, not telling it afterwards, and no one wants to be snowbound in some airport, red-eyed and stranded with the stench of all-night travel sickening even in one's own nostrils...
...But even Chicago's practiced drivers had slowed to a crawl by the time we reached the toll booths, and the radio dispatcher announced that flights leaving O'Hare were delayed at least an hour...
...Such tales are told and songs sung in the most prosaic of places these days...
...But I knew it would turn out all right, with family and dinner and warm clothes waiting at the story's end...
...It is an ancient Mariner, / And he stop-peth one of three...
...Airport lounges swirl with epic stories of sudden storms and near disasters, flights missed or flights caught only by the narrowest of margins...
...When you know the way that stories ought to go, you may find yourself nudging life to go along...
...And as he listened, you could see forming slowly in his mind the story he would tell when he finally got back home: "So there I was, waiting and waiting, afraid to go to sleep and miss the flight announcement, and the whole while, there's this strange old guy sitting next to me, droning on and on in an endless story about the time he wanted to rent a car on Christmas Eve...
...It's always the night before Christmas as these odysseys begin, or Thanksgiving or Easter or the Fourth of July...
...Auden, died in 1973...
...But he listened and listened, watching the snow slant through the arc lights on the disappearing runway...
...God knows the price is too high and no one in his right mind could be willing to pay it knowingly," Hannah Arendt cried when her sad friend, W.H...
...No, I can't say you ever did," I answered, and settled back to stare out the snowy window at the faces of the drivers inching along the airport road...
...And yet, tweaked just one notch closer to disaster, travel suddenly inverts itself into that stuff from which the oldest myths were made—falling rightly, naturally, gently into the ancient patterns of a story...
...J. Bottom...
...Recently, however, I have begun to wonder whether that isn't more a failure of my living—of my eyes to see, my ears to hear...
...Ieven used to think that we tell stories in self-defense, rounding off the bad life, easing the painful edges...
...There was important news, my wife had said over the phone, but she didn't want to tell me what it was until I got back to New York...
...Only a little spring storm," the taxi driver assured me as we rolled down the gray, winter streets that flow from the University of Chicago out toward the tollways, "the plows can take care of something like this in no time...
...So there I was," he murmured on and on, "wondering how I'd ever let him talk me into this...
...The first flakes were sticking to the taxi's window as I left for the airport to fly home...
...Most travel is just travail, a deadening getting-through only for the sake of getting through...
...the frustrated ones have the baffled look of angry cows about to smash themselves against a fence...
...The patient faces waiting at an airline ticket counter have the same blank, forsaken look as dust sheets on old furniture...
...So there I was in Chattanooga," the old man in the tweed overcoat at O'Hare was telling the college boy flying standby to Milwaukee, "and there's just this one poor guy left closing up the rent-a-car counter...
...Did I ever tell you," the driver began as he fumbled for change in a Dixie cup taped to the dashboard, "about the time I picked up a fare at O'Hare on Christmas Eve, snowing just like this, and he wants to go all the way to Peoria...
...That is the nature of tales, to be told, and told, and told again...
...Every tale I've ever told has run a little smoother in the telling than in the living...
Vol. 2 • May 1997 • No. 36
