Over Thanksgiving break, my aunt and uncle on my mom’s side drove up from New Jersey to visit. My parents and my aunt and uncle have all been friends forever, even before they were married. So I figured, who better to get a story from? I told the four of them over dinner one night about the assignment and asked them for one of their best stories. The four of them had all lived together in the Bronx for several years, so I was sure I would get some wild stories from those years. And I was far from disappointed.
I didn’t just get one story. I got a deluge of them. We talked for hours, my parents, aunt, and uncle reminiscing about when they were younger while my brother and I just listened. They told stories about finding a coating of lint in a meal a friend cooked for them once, about accidentally letting their dog run onto an equine racetrack during a race, of how they all met, of course, and much more. But there was one story that stuck out to me more than most.
My aunt is a veterinarian who specializes in racehorses, hence the racetrack story I mentioned before, and went to school at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania. However, she did all this after dropping out of the first college she attended and working for a bit as a racehorse jockey. So, when she decided to apply to Columbia, she asked her friends, my parents and uncle, for a little help. Together, they went to a local restaurant in the Bronx to help my aunt write her college essay.
They told me they went around in a circle, adding, subtracting, and editing for hours on end, laughing and messing around as much as they were working. They decided to draw on my aunt’s unique experience as a jockey as the central pitch of the essay. Not only was the essay good enough for my aunt to get in, but it was good enough for all four to remember specific lines from it even all these years later.
This story stuck out to me, not necessarily because of what it was about, but how it was told. My aunt was the one who started to tell the story, it was her essay after all, but before long, everyone else was interrupting her, providing details she may have forgotten, re-telling certain moments from their perspective, or just making jokes about the whole experience. Watching the four of them working together, and sometimes against each other, to tell this story was a near mirror image of the story itself. I could imagine the four people in front of me laughing and writing together, all working toward some common goal. My parents ceased to be my parents, my aunt wasn’t my aunt, and my uncle was no longer my uncle. Instead, they were four best friends, reminiscing, laughing, and enjoying each other’s company, just like they did in the Bronx all those years ago.
