The Story that fuels the dream... (What’s yours, and who is telling it?)

Turns out I am not alone. John McCain wants to write a prequel, too. According to the Sunday Times, his campaign wanted to tell the story of John McCain the war hero, maverick, bipartisan, change making, fighting, survivor, not so old man... but they needed to make up their mind about who he was first. His campaign is faltering - can this really be? - because they couldn't figure out which version of his life story would have traction.

Naturally, thinking about John McCain’s story-telling woes brought to mind Carrie Underwood. Here’s why: his story, the one he wearied of telling, was the story of his imprisonment and subsequent transformation - from jet crashing entitled boy to patriotic leader. Carrie Underwood’s story is about a young woman spinning out on black ice and finding God. In both cases, the way the story gets told is everything. Take the song. Chances are you’ve spun out on a patch of black ice. Maybe you even did it with a kid or two in the car. Your heart stopped, you thanked your lucky stars, and drove on. You thought you’d for sure tell someone when you got home, but by the time you got home, you were breathing steadily again. The dog had chewed up a napkin while you were out, so you dealt with all those little bits of shredded wet paper, and didn’t think about “the incident” again... until one of your friends mentioned that he had spun out and then you remembered how terrified you’d been. For a cool couple mil, Carrie Underwood tells the same story like this: (“Jesus Take the Wheel”):

She was driving last Friday on her way to Cincinnati//On a snow white Christmas Eve/Going home to see her Mama and her Daddy with the baby in the backseat/Fifty miles to go and she was running low on faith and gasoline//It'd been a long hard year/She had a lot on her mind and she didn't pay attention/she was going way too fast/Before she knew it she was spinning on a thin black sheet of glass/She saw both their lives flash before her eyes/She didn't even have time to cry/She was sooo scared/She threw her hands up in the air
****It was still getting colder when she made it to the shoulder/And the car came to a stop/She cried when she saw that baby in the backseat sleeping like a rock/And for the first time in a long time//She bowed her head to pray...

Truth is, I don’t think those lyrics quite make the cut. Not as poetry, anyway. But here’s the thing: I cry. Every time I hear that song, I cry. Maybe because I like the way she belts it out. Maybe because I am grateful every time I slide my hand under my daughter’s chin - the one whose car seat didn’t wince when that woman in Portland zipped through a red light and totaled our car. Maybe because she gives me all the details. It was Christmas. She was tired. She was grateful. She pulled over. She screwed up, and she wondered how big a price she was going to have to pay for that.

McCain’s crafty storytellers have a harder job. The story they are telling doesn’t grow out of common experience. (I hardly know anybody, for example, who’s crashed more than one plane and then got to try again). The interesting bit is that McCain gets to try. He’s been in public life long enough that anyone who wanted to could cobble the facts together and make something of them. McCain (and Obama, and most people running for president as far as I can tell) already hired someone to write his story - to put those facts together in a way that cast him in the most compelling light. (Rolling Stone recently came a long way toward dismantling that effort: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/make_believe_maverick_the_real_john_mccain But actually, that’s not the point.

The point is that we get to write our own stories. And we don’t have to re-write the facts. How many times have I asserted that my career doesn’t add up? Doesn’t make sense - it’s some of this and some of that. My friends lament that their lives seem not all that gripping - “What have I done?” My bet is, way more than you’ve given yourself credit for. What if you took a day and wrote the story of all those jobs and trials and tribulations - just long enough to make a cover letter sound plausible. Or better yet, jotted down a few of those moments from grade school, too. (When did you find out for real that it’s not okay to put a rock in a snowball?) And then, what if we relied on that story once we liked it - and we honored it. Even lived by it. Maybe it would go something like this: “One day Leon Leonwood Bean came home from a hunting trip with cold, wet feet ...” and everything we did after that grew naturally, organically, from that moment.

I think there’s hope in that, and not just because I think Bean boots are ugly. People go to LLBean for more than the boots, totes and cashmere. They go to live the story, to be a part of something bigger than retail, kind of the way I think Obama is bigger than politics, and we are all probably a little bit bigger than we feel right now.