A Tourist in Mayberry

Prologue

This Writer's World tip of the Week....Avoid prologues and be careful with beginning your story with a personal narrative. It can become hokey or preachy and might put your reader off.

Prologue: Daisy Now

We are human beings and being human we want to know the truth, even when it is too ugly to look at or makes no sense. I am Daisy. This is my story and it is sometimes ugly - so ugly there are times you need to look away. You probably won't because by nature we are curious and want to know and to understand. We want to look at the car wreck as we drive by. We want to know who, and we want to know why. Sometimes there is no why. There is just "c'est la vie" or "que sera, sera" or, as my Nana Gail puts it, "What it is, is what it is."

This is my part of the story about what happened the summer when the truth about what was really happening in my little town tried to come to the surface. You may have read the stories already or saw the news, but no one knows the entire truth. This is a story about good and evil and love and hate. This is not a story where evil is black and good is white. Sometimes things are gray and not so pure, but I will let you decide.

My mentor, Miss Livengood, told me authors should write about what they know, even when their story seems unbelievable. I read a lot, so I know my story will seem stranger than fiction, but this story is the truth of what happened in my hometown of Mount Airy, North Carolina. It is just like when the opening movie credits say - "Based on a True Story" or, in more words from my Nana: "You can't make this shit up."

My story is the perfect story because it has it all: murder and mystery, revenge, disappearances, a love story or two, conflict, tragedy, and some unlikely heroes. In my story, heroes come in all shapes and sizes. Villains do too.

I was fourteen that summer and I was in love with my teacher, Miss Bernie Livengood. Not that way in love because I was certain my inability to not gaze for hours at Gregory Pardon's blue eyes and undeniably perfect eyelashes and eyebrows (yes, even his eyebrows were perfect) made me heterosexual. Miss Livengood was the teacher who encouraged me to write and literally made me a writer by insisting I was one. When I made up my own words and they looked like words and sounded like words, for example, "tutorledge" which means to mentor someone, Miss Livengood said William Shakespeare did this too. He made up his own language.

I am no William Shakespeare in anyone's imagination, but like him, I love language, the way it sounds and looks and plays alone or with others. I am a dictionary.com, word-of-the-day kind of girl. Words fascinate me. Words like: incandescent, translucent, stalwart, arbitration, fierce, lionize, rollick, frolic. Sometimes words I can not spell or sound aloud, but long to know intimately like: syncope, or tepid, or comeuppance, or guffaw, or effervescent. Words making fun of themselves, like harum-scarum or indubitably or gobsmacked. Words demanding to be said out loud. Words that are beauty for the sight impaired.

Don't worry, my story will not bog you down with words you have to look up in the dictionary. Like a museum visitor viewing the master's work or an audience member at the fashion show, I admire and I appreciate, but I cannot imitate. Turns out, everything about me is ordinary and forgetful, and I am absolutely incapable of being dressed up. You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, even with words. If you are reading this story for beautiful language to mesmerize your sensibilities, then you are going to be disappointed. But, if you want to hear a story, then you are in the right place.

Under Miss Livengood's tutorledge, I became a writer. I learned writing is something I require for happiness and life. It is oxygen. It is the blood pumping through my veins. It is satisfaction. When I began writing in my diary journal, I was a teenager with a longing I couldn't name then but discovered later was a person with a story needing to be told. I became a storyteller, a chronicler of events of truth and beauty and unbelievable terror. This is how this story came to be.

One truth you will learn from my story is that, just like meanness and bad things, there is good all around too - sometimes in the places and in the people you would least expect.

Author's Note - I do love words, some I never use but covet like they are my personal savior. Ok, authors and readers: tell me words you adore for just the way they look or sound or feel.