A Story Worth Telling

So, I'm going to start telling stories, posting the stories from my life sometimes. They'll drop pseudonyms as needed. But, I want to start writing them and putting them out there.

Submitted for the approval of the Memoir Society, I call this story "Nothing But Yams."

It had been a while since Krystin and I had hung out. She had been dealing with personal trouble (to the tune of relationships and all that jazz) and I had been running the sound boards for Shorter College's Dance Concert (imaginatively titled "Light in Motion"). So, we hadn't had a chance to hang out in forever. But, we were taking time and getting back together. And it just so happened that we were playing Magic.

For those of you who weren't nerds in middle school and have thus grown up to productive lives with beautiful spouses, Magic: The Gathering is a trading card game with the conceit that you and your opponent are wizards standing at opposite ends of a battleground. You summon creatures, cast spells and enchantments, and draw power from the land, trying to slay your opponent. Suffice it to say, this game is not sexy. At all. And I hadn't played it in years. My parents had burned my green and black deck in the backyard barbeque, using the pages of a V.C. Andrews novel as kindling. The devil was in these cards and they were not pleased.

But, Krystin and I have an awkward friend. He really enjoys hanging out with Krystin, but he's so awkward that they can't simply hang out; they have to have something to do. So, Krystin came up with the idea of having him teach her how to play Magic so that they could do something instead of attempting to maintain a really awkward conversation.

I digress. Krystin and I were playing on my coffee table, blowing through game after game while we talked to my roommate Nick and his boyfriend William. The theatre department potluck had concluded a few hours before, and we had just been shooting the shit for a while, talking about a little of this and a little of that, but mostly keeping things witty and light. We were talking about how things had gone that semester and how busy everyone had been.

"We haven't hung out in ages." Krystin said.

"Yeah, I know. But you had stuff and I had my English Oral Exam, and it just wasn't a good time." I responded.

William speared another piece of turkey and said "How'd that go, by the way? I never got a chance to ask?"

"It went fine. I mean, I had to read Heart of Darkness and they didn't ask me a single question about it, so that kind of sucked."

Nick got up and opened the window and said, "I've heard that book is awful. Nothing but yams." The conversation hit a brick wall. Krystin and I glanced across the table at each other, mentally trying to figure out what Nick meant by his comment. Finally, I said, "What?"

He looked at me. "My friend Kristi, she hated it when she read it. She just looked at me one day when she was reading it and said 'This book is about nothing but yams. That's all they talk about yams. Africa and yams. Yams, yams, yams."

"There are no yams in Heart of Darkness." Krystin and William nodded. "I mean, if there are, they aren't really a big deal."

"Are you sure? What's that book about?"

"A boat trip up the Congo River."

"Oh, well what book was she talking about?" We didn't know. We tried Googling it, but we couldn't find anything that made any sense. Someone theorized that it might have been Cry! They Beloved Country, but none of us had ever read it. I later read on Wikipedia that yams are a major symbol in Achebe's Things Fall Apart. I loved that book, but I haven't read it in years, so I had no idea. But, from that point on, we started using the phrase "nothing but yams" to describe something that was bad. "The Feast of Caroles is nothing but yams."

And truth be told, Heart of Darkness is nothing but yams.