We’ve all heard them. Our parents, mentors, rabbis, and priests tell us these stories in which promising souls make fateful choices.
You know how they go:
“Uncle Al was so smart as a kid, until he started smoking the devil’s weed at 15. Now he’s 50 and shelving DVDs at Blockbuster.”
“The captain of our high school football team got three Division 1 scholarship offers, but he couldn’t resist drinking schnapps that night with his friends down by the railroad tracks…”
The cautionary tale that made the most indelible impression on me as a child involved my grandfather’s sister, who married an FBI agent. His cover required him to take multiple women out to dinner and shows throughout their marriage. My friends, will you be surprised when I tell you that he was not, in fact, an FBI agent?
Then there are more subtle cautionary tales, the type I fear will be told about me.
“Your aunt Sheila had a really good job, but she didn’t want to work in corporate, so she decided to ‘do her own thing’ and she went from living in a beautiful home with nice things to eating cat food out of a can.”
Because that’s how it goes. When you fail, you always end up eating cat food out of a can.
What’s the point of these cautionary tales? Do you remember Goofus and Gallant from Highlights magazine? Goofus always made bad choices. Gallant always made good choices. It’s instructional. They tell us how not to behave.
Don’t be stingy. Don’t dabble in gateway drugs. Don’t choose a man who gives dubious answers when you ask why Gladys saw him downtown with a blonde on his arm.
Storytelling is prehistoric. We’ve been using it to tell our children how to make choices for millennia, and I am not above using it to manage mine. You do what you have to as a parent. It reminds me of one of my favorite bits about conspiracy theories from the comic Ron Funches (**NSFW**!).
But the tales can carry more than instructions inside them, like regret, fear, and control. Regret is tricky; how do you regret a “bad” decision when you know it’s all part of what you become? Fear is there because people who care about you don’t want you to feel the blowback of bad choices. But control, that is where benevolence ends and judgment begins.
Judgment depends on the storyteller’s values. The funny thing about judgment is that it goes both ways: even traditionally successful people can be a cautionary tale (flashback to my dad telling me about his high school friends who “went away to college at Notre Dame and came back jerks.”)
So if I am someone’s cautionary tale, I hope the listener considers the storyteller, too. What were they afraid would happen? What did they believe a successful life was supposed to look like?
Maybe there’s an instruction in my story. But even if I’m scooping out Fancy Feast when you hear it, I hope you’ll look past the judgment and make your own meaning.
