Why Truth Beats Fiction

You can't make this stuff up:
According to the Associated Press, an Ohio man was arrested after he was alleged to have consumed fifteen beers, just prior to making too sharp a high speed turn on his motorized bar stool.

It seems to me, in one sense, that's the very stuff of what family legend is made. You can almost imagine the conversation at wedding receptions and birthday parties: "Yeah, that's my Uncle Zack; he got a DUI on his bar stool," followed by "that's him? I heard about this!"

Years ago some of my high school friends stole over the high wall of a monastery at midnight to harrass--I'm sorry to say--the monks. The story is so strange on a number of accounts, even though it's true. In the first place, who lives close to a monastery anymore? In the suburbs? In the 70s? The story goes that one of these teenage ruffians had to scamper up an olive tree and sit in it all night, because a big, barrel-chested Friar Tuck stormed out of the monastery and started pumpking rock salt out of a shotgun.

My wife has a colorful Greek uncle, who--as family lore has it--wandered between mildly pixilated and vaguely dangerous. He was given to making up words, and entire phrases, in a language no one else understood. ("Is that Greek?" strangers would ask, and the Greek relatives would respond, "no one knows what he's saying.") This side of the family was part of the Greek resistance to the Nazis during World War II and "Uncle George" was rumored to have left the love of his life in Greece when he came to America. From all accounts, he was crazy--in more or less an amusing way--until one day, in a fight with a deputy sheriff, he wound up locking the deputy in the trunk of his squad car. When he was arrested, he heard a familiar voice over the wall of the jail--and fell into a conversation with another relative who was arrested on an entirely different matter. Call it a family reunion, I guess.

How is it that events completely beyond the pale in the here and now somehow become gentle legends when considered in the abstract, at a distance? It's nearly suicidal to pursue a life of legend, and people who try to make a legend out of their antics usually wind up hospitalized, dead, or worse, but sometimes the Almighty allows an act born of passion, a sheer piece of momentary idiocy, to stand more or less unrequited by the physical and legal universe. Call it mercy, or comedy, I guess--the Divine sort.

At any rate, don't try any of this at home. No one will believe you.