"One Conflict-Free Life Please. To Go."

The Storybook Cafe on Elm was all concrete, metal, and glass. There was a row of stools facing the window, lined with hipsters and their Macboooks, no doubt earning money through social media management and marketing.

The barista wore a red flannel shirt, a beard, and brown boots. How, I wondered, did this lumberjack end up in perpetually sunny, 70-degree Beachtown, California. I glanced at the menu.

"What can I get for you?"

I put the menu down. "I will have one conflict-free life. To go."

"That's not on the menu."

I frowned and glanced at the menu again. Then I winked at him casually.

"It is for me."

"It's not on the menu for anyone."

"That's not true. I know for a fact you just served it to Miss Knee-high Boots and Tunic over there." I gestured to a tall blonde, sipping from her cup dreamily, staring at her screen.

"What other customers ordered doesn't matter. And besides, that wasn't what she ordered. Because it's not on the menu."

"It should be. It would really help your sales."

"That's not exactly the point."

"You mean it's not your job to give the customer what they want?"

"We serve stories, Ma'm. Thus the name."

Hipsters. What bunch of smart-asses. I persisted: "But that's all I want. I don't want any of these other things: 8 ounces of sorrow with a joy rinse? Relationship conflict with a character boost? Who would want that? Sounds like you get a lot of what you don't want, for just a tiny bit of what you do want."

"I don't make the menu. I just serve it. If you need more time to decide, I will help the next guest while you consider." He gestured to the man behind me and I stepped aside, disgruntled.

I took a seat at a glass table.

All I wanted was to be happy and stress-free. I didn't see the problem. An old man sitting next to me wearing a scarf and dark-rimmed glasses interrupted my thoughts.

"Might I make a suggestion?"

I was suspicious, but eternally polite, as always - a trick I learned to reduce conflict on my own. "Certainly."

"If you want a conflict-free life, you can try next-door at Dissipation Brewery. But I must warn you, I spent a lot of time there in my younger days and the conflict-free life doesn't exist. It might last for awhile, but it always disappears. That's why I dreamed up this." He gestured to the cafe.

"How do you stay in business?" I asked bluntly.

"Because people only think they want a conflict-free life. What they really want is a meaningful life; they want strong character, quiet confidence, and trust in something beyond themselves. Even when they say they don't want those things, they do."

I sat there annoyed. I wished I could tell him to stop talking to me.

"The good stories always have conflict because without conflict, people would stay in stasis - forever at the beginning of their story, never changing, never growing, never reaching the promised land. Just stuck at the beginning of the story. What if Frodo had stayed in the Shire? What if Huck Finn had stayed with his father?"

"They would have avoided a lot of trouble?" I quipped.

He ignored me.

"What do you really want out of your story? I bet if you thought about it, you would discover that the conflict-free life is priced much higher than any human being can afford. That is why it is not on the menu. It costs your character, your empathy, your hopefulness, your dreams, the fulfilling of your needs, your spiritual life, your personal relationships, and cost upon cost until your life is bankrupt of worth." He stood and folded his paper, taking his cane as he did so.

"For dissipation, you can visit the place next door. To get your life started, stop protecting yourself. He who seeks to save his life will surely lose it."

I sat silently. I knew I should feel inspired. But I just felt nothing.

It may have been a few hours, or minutes, but when I looked up, the lumberjack stood in front of me with a frothy latte.

"The gentlemen you were speaking with earlier ordered this for you."

"What is it?" I looked at it suspiciously.

"He said not to tell you. But to say that it was good." Then he set it down and walked away.

Outstanding Metaphors

Metaphors are the bane of every high school English student’s existence. “Why can’t they just say what they  mean?” students often complain.

“Because metaphors are beautiful,” I would reply. 

I was wrong – well, partly wrong.

While reading the book Sunshine by Robin McKinley, I had a metaphor-related epiphany. [ Side note: If you haven’t read anything by Robin McKinley yet and you like fantasy, I am delighted to recommend her; she is one of my favorite authors. The Blue Sword is my personal favorite out of all of her novels, but Chalice is good as well.] The main character is a baker at a local café. One day she is sitting in her car and a leaf lands on her windshield. I don’t have the exact quote – alas! I had no idea how this minor metaphor would change my life – but she compared the leaf to a slivered almond. I paused – which is a big deal when I am reading, because I don’t even pause to eat sometimes. I pictured the leaf perfectly in my mind, not because I knew what leaves looked like (though I do) but because I knew what slivered almonds looked like, and I could imagine a leaf that looked like that. And I realized that I was picturing EXACTLY the same leaf that McKinley had been picturing. She could have just said leaves. She could have said autumn leaves and been trite. But she had used a metaphor that communicated her idea perfectly.

Then it dawned on me. As teachers, our job is (wait for it) to teach students new concepts. One of the very big parts of teaching is something called scaffolding which, as I’m sure you could figure out yourself, means you take what you want your students to learn and use their prior knowledge to help them learn it.

For example, if my students don’t understand what dramatic irony is I say, “You know how in every scary movie there is a scene where a girl dressed in her pajamas decides to go explore the basement to see what all those creepy noises are about, but we know that a vicious killer is down there because we saw him break into the basement in the previous scene? And everyone in the theater wants to scream at the stupid girl to go back upstairs and call the cops because there is a madman in her basement? That’s dramatic irony.” I took something they didn’t understand – dramatic irony – and explained it to them using something they did understand – horror films.

That is exactly what an outstanding metaphor (or simile – it works the same way) does. It takes an idea and explains it clearly – and uniquely – using something we know.

The major difference between scaffolding and metaphors is that usually metaphors don’t introduce completely new concepts, but instead introduces familiar concepts in completely new ways. Here is an example:

“Hands, like secrets, are the hardest thing to keep from you.” [“Dismantle” by Anberlin]

Here, the songwriter doesn’t think that his listeners have never been in love or wanted physical contact with someone they love; instead, he isn’t sure they’ve experienced it the same way. So he uses a simile to help communicate his experience. For him, restraining physical touch is as impossible as restraining from communicating. From this simile, we see complex layers of a relationship that involves not just desire, but an emotional connection, a friendship, a sharing of life together in multiple ways.

And, I must admit, he says all of that much more beautifully and succinctly than I just did simply by using a simile.

This is why cliché metaphors are so meaningless – they don’t show things to us in a new way or reveal new complexity because they are overused. When someone says their heart is broken that doesn’t really tell me anything other than that they are sad. I have heard that metaphor so much that it doesn’t communicate anything more than literal language would. But if someone tells me that their “heart is an empty room” (Death Cab for Cutie) I learn that they feel they have no one to love, they feel desolate, they feel perhaps abandoned.

Thanks to Robin McKinley, I no longer torment my students by telling them that authors only use metaphors because they are pretty. Now I say, “Authors use metaphors because they are beautiful, but most importantly they use metaphors because we learn through metaphor. We can only learn something new by using what we already know to build that new knowledge. Metaphors help you understand something new, something different, something better.”

What outstanding metaphors have you stumbled across in your reading?