Story people

It happened to me again today when I accompanied my mom to the nearby supermercado to get a few things we needed at home. The older woman approached me and, unbidden and uninvited, started telling me her life story.

"My mom has a corn on her left foot that's bleeding, so I'm going to buy her this pair of open sandals," she said, looking me straight in the eyes as if I'd known her forever, as if I'd come to the supermarket with her and not my mom. "Do you think that's a good idea?"

I nodded and mumbled something about her being very nice to take care of her mother, and I opened a fashion magazine and quickly started leafing through the pages, not really paying much attention to what I was seeing, but hoping my interlocutor would desist in her intention to make me a part of her world.

When we left, my mom commented: "Your face must tell people that they can talk to you. People don't do that to me."

I groaned because it's true. Throughout my entire life in Puerto Rico, total strangers have felt at ease in making me privy to their innermost thoughts and their most private affairs. Perhaps it's sad to say, but after more than two decades in waspy gringolandia, I've certainly become de-Puerto Rican-nized in many ways and my general lack of appreciation for that "gift" is certainly one of them.

But since I'll probably always be much too bien educada to make such lack of appreciation evident, these invitations to invade someone else's privacy likely will just keep happening.

In the meantime, what I've come to understand is that we, as Puerto Ricans, are a story people. We are made up of stories and we create ourselves from our stories so it's through stories that we communicate and make connections with each other, whether such ties are desired or not.

When I was at the Atlanta airport waiting for my flight to Puerto Rico, my Red Sox baseball cap pulled low over my eyes and intently pretending to read a bible-thick book, I was at ease to eavesdrop on the many conversations going on around me, among the Puerto Ricans waiting along with me.

I heard stories of deceit and loss, about a husband who had cheated his wife with his high-school sweetheart, "who is now so much fatter and uglier than me," said the woman to her friend with glee. Stories of war and death, about the Puerto Ricans fighting in Iraq who have no decent equipment and can't even vote for the president who sends them to fight. "I had to buy my cousin a bullet-proof vest and some good shoes," said the man to his friend. "This war is like Vietnam, there's no way to win it."

I smiled to myself, at the oracle-like certainty with which the man spoke, at the dark humor in the woman's secret vengeance: that the other-woman that split her marriage had turned out to be homelier than she imagined. I smiled because these were all stories of people coming together and clashing and loving and hating and trying to work things out and laughing and grieving and trying to make sense of the world around them.

I smile to myself as I write this because I realize that I also am a story woman, made up of stories and creating myself out of stories.

Perhaps, I conclude, it is a gift after all that so many stories come to me, unbidden and uninvited, but expected. Perhaps, I conclude, in another life and another time, I was the story teller to whom the stories came, unbidden and uninvited, to be told and disseminated.