The Six Segment Story Stack to Start Twenty-Sixteen

First, the story behind the story:

The year was 2007. I had just moved from Upstate South Carolina to Charleston, and every week I had a very important appointment with my roommate. It involved a trip to Sonic and a TV show called Gilmore Girls. The tradition actually started when I was a Freshman at Wofford College. Thursday night was still Must See TV back then. At 7:30PM, four of my hallmates and I would walk to the campus coffee shop. I would order a white chocolate mocha, they would order their beverages of choice, and we would take them back to the room with the largest TV (not mine...it was a white 13” TV/VHS combo) and watch Friends.

Friends had been a part of my life for five years by then. My 8th grade band teacher referenced it one day during class, I went home and watched an episode, and I was hooked. And just so you know how hooked I was, before the days of DVD collections, I recorded a rerun of every episode, in order, on VHS, creating my own version of a Friends box set.

Friends was the one constant in my life as I took the leap from high school to college. Friends was the one thing that gave me hope that the world hadn’t totally fallen apart when, one Tuesday morning two weeks into my Freshman year, I came in from an 8:00 Calculus class, turned on my little white TV, and instead of Regis and Kelly, found Matt Lauer and Katie Couric talking about the plane that had just flown into the World Trade Center. I had only been watching for a minute when the second plane hit the other tower, and in that moment ‘horrible accident’ turned into ‘intentional attack on the United States’. For two days I thought nothing would ever be the same...there would be ‘before September 11’ and ‘after September 11’. All I wanted was for something that existed ‘before September 11’ to exist, unaltered, ‘after September 11’, for something to be familiar and comforting.

I very specifically remember wondering if Friends would come on that Thursday night. My version of the story goes that all day long was news, news, news, and then suddenly at 8:00 the news stopped and Friends appeared on the screen. It offered a glimmer of hope, thirty minutes of familiarity in the midst of fear and confusion, an occasional laugh that felt both inappropriate and necessary at the same time. Whether or not the timing happened the way I remember it really doesn’t matter. What does matter is what I realized from that experience, that sometimes things that seemingly don’t matter at all can matter the most. If it brings happiness, or joy, or a brief escape from the real world to even one person, it matters immensely.

So you can imagine my sense of loss when Friends ended in 2004. Or maybe you can’t. I’m not sure if it’s normal to grieve over the loss of a TV show. But normal or not, coffee and Friends night had evolved into Zaxby’s and Friends night, and in the fall of 2004 I found myself sitting on the couch with a Wings ‘n Things and nothing to watch.

Now to make what should have been the longest part of a short story the shortest part of a story that got much longer than I meant for it to be.

Gilmore Girls turned out to be a welcome replacement for Friends. And if I’m being honest, while a Friends episode on Nick at Nite before bed is always enjoyable, I have never seen a better-written or better-casted show than Gilmore Girls. It was lighthearted. It was quirky. It was a little bit whimsical. It was sixty minutes of the world I wished I lived in. And then in 2007, just after I moved across the state, just when I needed something familiar to take with me, Gilmore Girls ended. Seemingly forever (not so, according to recent buzz from Netflix, but should a Gilmore Girls mini series of sorts actually come to fruition that will be another blog entry for another day...I can’t even get my hopes up about that right now). So my roommate and I were left with our extra long coneys, our tater tots, our honey mustard, a diet Cherry Coke for me, a Dr. Pepper for her, and another void to fill.

In 2007, Lost was right up there with Gilmore Girls on my list of ‘Must See TV’. But in a not-at-all lighthearted, not-at-all quirky, not-at-all whimsical, not-at-all the world I wished I lived in sort of way. I’m an absolute baby when it comes to any sort of horror-inducing entertainment, and most weeks Lost was right at the edge of my limit, so I didn’t think it would make for a very enjoyable dining experience.

Which brings me to Pushing Daisies. You’ve probably never seen it. Only six million people watched it every week, which in today’s TV world would keep you on the air for ten years, but in the fall of 2007, six million viewers got you canceled after two seasons. Pushing Daisies was everything I loved about Gilmore Girls taken to the extreme. It was bright. It was colorful. It was funny. It was clever. It was lighthearted. It was quirky. It was nothing but whimsical. And it was about murder. Each week, a murder was solved by the pie-maker, who possessed the gift (or curse) of bringing people back to life with a single touch, and his childhood sweetheart Charlotte Charles, who the pie-maker just happened to bring back to life in the first episode.

Which got me thinking. Could I write a story about a serious subject and make it lighthearted and whimsical? What follows is the result of that thought.

 The child was unquestionably questionable. Everyone who knew her knew that. Yet no one who knew her really knew her at all.

 The Creator who created her created her well. She possessed all the basics. Two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth, two arms, two legs, two hands, two feet, ten fingers, ten toes, and a trunk to hold them all in place.

 Yet her basics weren’t so basic. She was perfectly symmetrical, which, contrary to common belief, is not so common. Her milky-white skin was flawless. No birthmarks, no moles, not even a man-made bump or bruise. To touch her was like touching porcelain. Constantly cool even on the warmest of days, and smooth as the smoothest silk.

 Inside her perfectly symmetrical eye sockets were two perfectly symmetrical eyes. In the center of those two perfectly symmetrical eyes were two perfectly symmetrical irises. They were baby blue, and their color was constant, never dependent on her daily attire.

 Below her two perfectly symmetrical eyes and a symmetrically-centered nose were two perfectly placed lips. She was much too little for lipstick, but her Creator had created her lips in such a way that lipstick would never be necessary. Salmon is the normal shade of lips in their natural state, but scarlet was the only shade her lips had ever shown.

 On top of the head that held the perfectly placed lips, the symmetrically-centered nose, and the two perfectly symmetrical eyes was a halo of hair, and it was as blond as blond can be. The bottom of her bangs brushed the peaks of her eyebrows, and the remainder rested right underneath her ears.

 Her eyes opened at exactly 7:00 AM every morning and blinked exactly 8400 times before closing at exactly 9:00 PM every night. Her lips never curled up, never curled down, and never separated, except to take five bites of breakfast, eleven bites of lunch, and a dozen bites of dinner every day.

 Her movable parts all moved. She wasn’t deaf, as evidenced by her ability to move all of her movable parts on command, and she wasn’t blind because she moved those movable parts without bumping into that which could be bumped into.

 Not only were her outsides odd, her insides were also. Her beating heart beat exactly sixty beats per minute, never more, never less. And within each minute, she inhaled and exhaled exactly eleven times. Her voice box was capable of voicing a voice, but no sound had ever sounded from it.

 To the possessors of the ever-present eyes that eyeballed the girl, she was most mysterious. The only indication that she was a living being was the slow rise and fall of her chest and the occasional blink that for a brief moment covered her baby blues.

 And she was the only child in all of Heaven.

                              ***

Part II next week. And by next week, I really mean next week this time.