October 26, 2011
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Truth, Lie, Another Truth, Another Truth, Another Lie…
Do you remember Two Truths and a Lie? This is going to be like that. Except it’s Six Truths and a Lie. Or maybe it’s Seven Lies and No Truth. Or, Fourteen Half-Truths. Or something else. You figure it out.
Ahem.
1) While hiking cross-country in England, my father and I lost track of the trail when in the middle of some farmer’s cow pasture. The cows thought we were there to feed them, and proceeded to chase us. We only got away from them by climbing a barbed-wire fence.
2) I and my wife both belong to the Biologically Firstborn Club. That is, we are each the only biological offspring of our respective parents, but we both have younger siblings who were adopted (two in her case, one in mine).
3) I have taken the PSAT, the PLAN, the SAT, the ACT, various NYS Regents Exams, the GRE, the Subject GRE (Literature), the LAST, I’m scheduled to take the CST next month and the ATS-W next semester. I’ve become so good at standardized tests that I was briefly a GRE tutor for Kaplan, training prospective grad students to do analogies.
4) In Seville I (by accident) found an unmarked door in an alley which lead to a restaurant where people were flamenco dancing. It was the best flamenco I’ve ever seen. Seville is apparently the heart of flamenco, and the place I had stumbled on is the heart of flamenco in Seville.
5) I once climbed a pre-Alp, one of the smaller mountains in the shadows of the Alps, in northern Italy. I climbed far enough that there were no more trees, only grass and crocuses and goat droppings, and there was snow on the ground in the hollows (even in April). I had to go to the bathroom, so I walked away from my traveling companions for a bit; I found a cliff, stood at its edge with the howling wind at my back, and peed off into infinity.
6) God once acted as my Research Assistant. While I was in grad school, struggling through a 35-page paper, I realized that I really needed another source, something to help tie all my main points together. I realized that I needed to go back to the library for more research. At that moment the doorbell rang. It was FedEx with a backordered book I had ordered from Amazon six months before. The book was Tolkien’s “The Monsters and Critics,” a book of literary criticism that I thought was only about Beowulf, but it turns out had a whole middle section about the very Middle English poem I was writing my paper on. The book turned out to be the exact source that I needed. As I stood there, flipping through it, the local Christian radio station (which I had on in the background) suddenly blared, “And this one goes out to Chris in Johnson City…” It was a song I had requested the previous week, with lyrics that ran, “So I’m a day late, maybe a buck short / I know I just can’t make this on my own… / Will you step in this life and take control?”
7) I was once stranded on Kythera, an island of the coast off Greece where Aphrodite was supposed to have been born of the sea-foam. The Aegean Sea was stormy and would not let the ferry back in to pick us up. I stayed there and wrote, and while I was there, I bought an empty notebook to use as a journal. Most of my best stories had their beginnings in that journal. I called it my Blue Notebook of Power, and it was like a portable muse.
Which stories are true?
So, I’m supposed to tag people to do this themselves, eh? Hrm…
@Kurasini , for the tagback.
@TheMarriedFreshman , for when you get back.
@Saakara , just in case you need two tags.
@SirNickDon , just because.
@empress8411 , to help you overshare.
@arenfro , for the wild card.
Comments (9)
They all sound perfectly plausible to me. You’re too good a storyteller, Chris.
5 and 7 are lies. Am I right?
I was going to guess 5 was a lie.
@stuartandabby - @GreekPhysique - Nope! 5 did happen, overlooking Lake Como. The wind at my back was so strong, I never saw it come down. And 7 is true as well: outoftheashes.xanga.com/642607929/the-blue-notebook-of-power/
I taught TOEFL preparation for a year. It was a great job and a huge blessing at the time, because I had just lost what I thought was my career and was terrified at the thought of unemployment.
I’m a youngest son who married an oldest daughter. My dad was and did the same, and I think his dad also did, as well as my maternal granddad.
3 is not true. You cannot take another test after the LAST test. Otherwise, it would be the NEXT TO LAST test.
Hmmm…I’m going to say that the one about both being biological firstborns is a lie, and so is the blue notebook of power. Glad I could be the wildcard pick!
The Cards were too, and it turned out pretty good for them!
Ope, and I’m at least half-wrong.
I remember when #6 happened, and I know #2 is true.