I'm making a little progress each day on the book I'm reading called The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty. It's still a painful book to read because the main character, Smithy Ide, is so unwilling to mask his deficiencies. But I love his insight about life. He's quite nonchalant about most things in life—including the time he got shot while fighting in Vietnam and the time he was hit by a truck while on his cross country bike ride. It's the in between moments—those moments when he's evaluating what has happened to him that I find most interesting.
One of those moments comes after he has just finished reading a book he bought on the road called Iggy. The book is set in the 1800's and it's about a black Cowboy who was just looking for his place in the world—sort of like Smithy.
Here's Smithy's reaction after finishing the book: "Anyway, Iggy. So good I was sorry I finished it. It was his whole life right until he was an old black man eating an apple under a Colorado cottonwood. Everybody would think that he was just another old black man, but all of us who read the book knew that he was a giant. A great man at the end of his life. It was a tender kind of a secret, and I loved knowing it."
What I liked about his take was this—obviously he knew that Iggy was a fictional character and that he would never really see Iggy sitting under a Colorado cottonwood. But it seems to me that Smithy was saying that everybody has a story and it's a shame that we pass each other by without listening to each other's stories more often.
If that's what he was saying, then I think Smithy was right.
And can't you just relate to his "tender kind of a secret" line? I instantly thought of many tender secrets. When I go to a concert and hear a "filler" song that never got any radio play, but for some reason, it touched me—I feel like I know a tender secret. When a friend tells me about his or her guilty pleasure, but doesn't want anybody else to know—I feel like I know a tender secret every time I see, hear, or experience his or her guilty pleasure. Not long ago, a man I know gave me several writing books. They belong to his father-in-law who passed away recently. As I flipped through them, I saw many passages underlined and all of them were the tender secrets of a man I never met.
Letting too many people know our tender secrets would somehow diminish their power. But what an empty life it would be if nobody knew our tender secrets.
