Drama in Real Life....

I bless the Reader’s Digest that recently arrived in mailbox – thanks for the subscription, Dad – for the twisted memories I found tucked inside its perfectly-sized-for-the-bathroom pages. Everyone of us, young or old, has at least one good Reader’s Digest memory, one part of that teeny periodical that attached itself to your brain and has stuck there for all these years. Jim and I giggled over our shared memory of the “I Am Joe’s (insert gross body part here)” articles but we both agree that the “Drama in Real Life” articles beat everything else in the book.

The current edition did not disappoint. Opening the magazine to its table of contents, I spotted those magical words, the enticing, oh-my-God-how-awful type of title that fascinated me decades ago: “Hit By a Train.” I burst out laughing.

Now, I probably shouldn’t have laughed that hard. The poor woman was, after all, “Hit By a Train” and now holds her toothbrush with a hook. The problem is, that title slammed into my brain as though I, too, had been “Hit By a Train.” My mind fell through a wormhole, straight back to my grandmother’s tiny bathroom with its stack of worn Reader’s Digests piled on the radiator. Nothing drew my attention more – not the dusty smelling Emeraude perfume powder puff nor the folding glass shower doors that jammed once and trapped me in the tub – than that stack of Reader’s Digests. I would head straight for the best one, the one at the bottom of the pile that, warm from its proximity to the radiator, would toast my legs while I sat reading, and page through it until I hit the Drama in Real Life section. I’d devour the illustrations, almost cartoons, of a particularly graphic part of the story – the limp body sinking under the water, the injured Boy Scout concocting a splint of sticks – and then go back to the beginning and read about Real Human Tragedy. This, by the way, was always the more accurate heading. “Drama in Real Life” could describe a wife-swapping party at your next door neighbor’s house that is inadvertently busted by cops acting on a tip that the school board president who lives there is abusing shelter dogs in his basement – but Reader’s Digest is a wholesome magazine whose only vaguely smutty stuff is the incontinence pad ads at the back of the book, so the benign “Drama” misnomer had to suffice.

So I’d sit there until my legs went numb, mesmerized by stories with titles that always lacked their grammatical direct object but never failed to draw me in. “Mauled by a Bear”, “Fell from the Chair Lift”, “Unable to Breathe” were typical but the really special stories, the ones you knew included a climb out of the pit of hell, were the ones with the single-word title like “Trapped”, “Mayday”, or “Fire”. These stories amazed me not because they were particularly graphic but because the tragedy was visited on a regular Joe who just wanted a day on the slopes or a woman who skidded off the road on the way home from the grocery store. They weren’t like the over-the-top tabloid tragedies where the victim did something so stupid they practically asked for the outcome. “Drama in Real Life” stories could happen to you, they could happen to me. I could be in Reader’s Digest for “Falling Down the Stairs” or encountering a “Rabid Dog.” Hell, I used to sit there so long it’s a wonder I wasn’t immortalized in “Sucked into the Toilet.”

There really isn’t a point to all this rambling unless I start talking about how the tiniest thing can present you with a memory-gift from the past. I haven’t smelled my grandmother for almost a decade now but I remembered her Emeraude as soon as I was “Hit By a Train.” I could compare the sensationalism of a gentler generation (were we?) to the in-your-face Iraqi beheading videos that my kids can easily find on the internet. I could wish that they’d be empathetic to a tragedy that befell some ordinary schmuck who just wanted to go fishing. But they’d probably tell me that they saw a better one on YouTube and I don’t want to know that. I don’t need my kids telling me that they saw a video of “I Am Joe’s Left Nut”… but I bet there’s one available.

(migrated from Facebook note....)