What Do Our Stories Tell Us About Ourselves and Our World?

Our lives consist of stories, both stories about things we experience and things that we construct from the myriad of threads that enter into the very fiber of our being. Growing up, Wilma Dykeman saw “an old bent man” walking by her house most days. She looked at him “with hungry curiosity” and thought of him as “someone from a story-book, someone unreal and fictional.” One day, the man spoke with Dykeman’s mother and Dykeman listened.

The man told them about the herbs and roots he carried with him, and on another day he told them about “an adventure he had had during the Civil War.” He told them that during the war he wasn’t in many battles, especially “the ones listed down in the hist’ry books and all,” and that the men he served with took to calling The Cap. During one battle, word got out to his fellow soldiers that The Cap was killed. The men retreated, in fear, but when they heard that his death was nothing more than a rumor and that word spread “The Cap still lives,” the men returned to the fighting and won the battle.

Later, after the man left, Dykeman asked her mother is she thought that the man’s story actually happened. Her mother told her, “No.” She continued by telling her that the man “wasn’t even in the Civil War probably.” This news disappointed Dykeman, but her mother continued by asking Dykeman a…