Stories

I found our class discussion on stories intriguing because I have semi recently read a book about how we as humans are stories and we should pay attention to the stories that we are living.  The name of the book is A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and the author, Donald Miller, wrote about his view that we all should consider how to live better stories. The book illustrates this through autobiographical stories from Donald’s life. Donald states that all good stories have a conflict where the main character wants to achieve or obtain some goal.  Personally, I find that the main idea of the book, that we are living stories, parallels the excerpts from King’s book that we read.  I was thinking of how these theories relate to my life. It made me think of some of the stories that I have told with my life. Some of the stories bring back a smile and a fuzzy memory. Others make me wince and feel regretful.

Freshman year feels like it was a bunch of stories that intertwined to create one big memory. Most of the memories involve my friends and I laughing. To the point of insanity. One particular story led to the big story of my 2^nd semester. This story occurs in the wonderful month of November on a normal weekday. I came back from class to discover my roommate Daniel and my friend Ziggy with tear soaked shirts. After a few quick inquiries, I found that they had uncovered the worst smell known to man. Apparently our suitemate had forgotten about a cookie tin full of muffins that his mother had given him back in August. And we were right in the middle of November. Ziggy had inadvertently opened the cookie tin and found out the hard way what happens when 3 months of interrupted decomposition is let loose on the nostrils. Needless to say, the stench was unbearable. A few minutes later, I arrived in the room and was told that it was absolutely necessary that I smell the toxic muffins. Several seconds later, there was a college freshman on the ground gagging.

Fortunately the story does not end there. While Ziggy was in the bathroom, I decided it would be hilarious to place the opened muffin tin in the bathroom and lock him in.  Screams ensued from the bathroom. Poor Ziggy couldn’t breathe the smell was so bad. So needing to salvage my reputation as a good friend, I attempted to put the cover back on the moldy muffins. However, I couldn’t get any closer than three feet without involuntarily gagging and retreating away. For 15 minutes we all attempted to dispose of the muffins while retaining our lunch. But the attempts were to no avail. By this time I was 40 feet down the hall from our room gagging on the floor because the smell was so bad. By that time, we were making quite a commotion and our RA came to our room. Being two years older than us and more mature, she quickly took the situation and remedied it by kicking the offensive muffin tin down to the hall trash can. Although the smell lingered in our room for several hours and half of a can of Febreeze had to be used to make our quarters livable again.

The story still makes me laugh today and I slightly gag when I smell Febreeze because it reminds me of that day. But this small, seemingly insignificant story played a large part in the 2^nd half of my freshman year story. Because of the muffin incident, I became better friends with Ziggy and joined his fraternity in the spring semester. I met some of my closest friends through the fraternity. That is why I like this story because it reminds me of my small stories will become parts of my big stories.