Sometimes when I daydream, I am on the edge of an overpass I’ve crossed hundreds of times, watching the flow of Interstate 635 below.
Keeping with the realism of good ol’ Texas, it isn’t rainy, or cloudy or otherwise dimmed. The sun is out, shining down, lovingly burning me with its infinite rays. If anything, this weather reflects what the highway symbolizes: hardship.
I’m not talking about driving on a Texas interstate, though I wouldn’t blame you for guessing that based on pick-up trucks going 80 mph on a 50 mph road. I’m talking about the vehicles, and the complex lives in each one.
In a strange way, the highway is an equalizer. No matter how rich or poor you are, the interstate is the fastest way to travel between certain parts of the Metroplex. That is, if you don’t fly a private jet and can afford a car. Everyone on that highway comes from all walks of life, yet must travel on the same cracked four lanes.
Each vehicle is distinct. That sixteen wheeler? It’s a middle aged driver with graying hairs, who works too long for too little. He tells his friends that his daily commute is the great American highway system, but he doesn’t tell them his boss almost fired him because a distracted driver damaged his cab the day prior. His wife wants him to quit, but this is all he knows.
That grey SUV? It’s a single mother on her way from her first job to the second. Sounds rough, but she’s thankful. She’s just bought an apartment of her own, escaping her abusive boyfriend and saving her son in the process. She may be exhausted, but is proud to have done it.
That yellow school bus? It’s a middle school class on a field trip to a science museum. The teacher had to pay out of pocket for lunch, since she didn’t get enough funding without cutting the visit short. Some of the kids were guilty because they knew they’d forged the signature on the permission slip to attend, an innocent fear they will subconsciously miss.
Everyone has a story with their own trials and tribulations, but from our perspective, it speeds by at 60 mph on a four-lane highway.
I have always been a story teller, ever since I wrote my first story about a talking turkey that was somehow a doctor fighting “the blue spot disease.” I couldn’t think of a substance to use as a cure at the end of the story, so I looked around and chose No. 2 pencils fed to patients.
Thankfully, I am not going to medical school.
Billy and the Blue Spot Disease was a mundane idea, but I found complexity out of a talking turkey doctor. That pattern extends across my fiction. Sure, I write exciting stories about vivid dystopias and war-torn nations, but I’ve also written of a young girl sitting on a hammock in a garden, an enclave of whimsy, or perhaps ignorance, in the Great Depression.
As a journalist, I’ve told about bomb threats, protests and 9-1-1 dispatch centers. But I am most proud of stories born out of the mundane.
The best story I wrote started as a fleeting thought about a reservoir I remembered as a kid. Most Coppell residents did not even know it still existed. For the next three months, this small reservoir made me pore over thousands of pages of legalese, interview prominent public figures, read environmental reports, understand municipal annexation code, attempt to hunt down a single file at the Dallas Municipal Archives and almost trespass onto a demolished power plant.
All from a small body of water not even considered a full lake.
The Sidekick is the only place where I can tell real stories about real people. Stories that no one else is telling. Stories that the sources themselves don’t think are “interesting enough.”
Ultimately, stories deserving to be told.
The least I can do is put my all into telling them right.
Someone asked me recently if I would prefer a view of the mountains or the beach. My dream view is Interstate 635, where I can watch stories pass by my window.
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