Third hand

First there was the confrontation in the train station. I guess it went: 'That's the one, Dad, the one who robbed me.' Then an argument between a big man and a skinny boy, the boy's production of a knife, the man's removal of coat and bag. Threats, warnings, the exit of the boy. Then, as I understand it, there was the arrest of the kid, the transfer of his case from one police force to another, and finally the trial for assault with a deadly weapon.

The details are sketchy because my neighbor, having just spent two days on the jury for the trial, was bursting yesterday evening with her impressions: the slouchy way one (or both?) of the boys sat in the witness chair and the slapdash way he answered questions; the suspicion of lying ('I think they really knew each other before'); the way the prosecution edited the surveillance tapes.

Then there were the deliberations, the reluctance of some to convict vs my neighbor's insistence that the evidence make the determination; the request of one jury member to review the tapes again: 'It's his right,' my neighbor argued.

But it all became vivid when she, a large, voluble woman, played the role of the skinny, scared kid: 'He held the knife and went backwards, see,' invisible knife up at her shoulder stepping away from me, 'not forward. He went backward, he didn't advance,so it wasn't an assault but self-defence, do you see?'  On the basis of that vivid demonstration, yes, I could see. 'So we had to find him not guilty,' she said.

So events become stories, and encounters breed encounters on and on. I wasn't in angry confrontation; I didn't have the responsibility to determining the truth; I only had the passion of my neighbor to appreciate, her outburst a release of her experience of violent emotions depicted in the context of cool legal judgment. Stories aren't simply repeated, but they're embedded in the circumstances of their telling, and so less in some ways, more in others, than the original. Each teller, each listener re-encounters the original in new guise.

Here's another aspect of story-telling. I was looking out my office window today as sea mist rolled in visibly from the harbor in the east between the tall downtown buildings and blotted out the view of the river to the west. Suddenly though, for a moment, the patchy fog lifted, a few shafts of watery sunlight plunged through and the river became clearly visible, and I was put in mind of the clouds depicted on Chinese scrolls to separate the episodes of long stories which pull back to reveal now an army massed, now a royal pleasure garden, now a mystic and his mountain.

Unexpected stories, surprise encounters: how alive the world is with them.