When the elderly lady seated at my desk asked why I walked with a cane, I explained how I got hit by a bus when I was 5 years old, how my mother pleaded with the doctor not to amputate my leg, for, she wanted me to have two legs like other little boys and not be ridiculed for a prosthesis or stump.
She left dabbing her eyes, and the next customer who sat down asked why the woman had left my desk with misty eyes and a moist tissue.
I related that she had inquired how I had hurt my leg, and I went into great detail that, during the war, I had put this wounded guy up onto the tank to get us the hell out of the line of fire, and that when I jumped aboard, the tank turret swung around to blast the bad guys and snapped my leg at the thigh, shattering my femur now held together with pins and screws.
The guy who followed the (now) two weeping women departing my desk asked about the commotion, and I simply told him they were moved about how my leg had been mangled and horribly broken on my vacation to Hawaii, when I swam out way too far to rescue a swimmer in distress, how the lifeguards spotted the guy and got to him with a boat before I ever could have, but how a wave caught and flipped me, throwing my body into a jagged reef.
The 20-year old ‘hottie’ noticed my cane as I stood to greet her wincing with pain, and I answered her inquisitive glance recounting how I was stuntman some thirty years ago when I was her age, and how I’d been hurt practicing a stunt to be in a Steve McQueen movie, nearly losing my leg and absolutely losing the chance to be credited in the movie.
As they came and went away with different stories without the benefit of a "Fiction" ‘tag,’ I was notably impressed by the amount of fiction craft a writer can perfect without ever lifting a pen or using a keyboard, that—whether in print or by voice—it’s all in the telling, now, isn’t it ::wink::
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