Mary Jewel Ledbetter

It’s her fault you are reading this.

My high school English teacher in the 1970s and 80s, Mrs. Ledbetter taught me to love words. 

I can still see her slaloming between our desks in her blah-colored shirt and sandstone cardigan playing a haunting melody on a small bamboo flute. Her curly, mousey hair and leather loafers appeared mundane, but she was one of the most fascinating people I have ever met.

Every summer, Mrs. Ledbetter would do something adventurous: white water rafting, polar bear watching, backpacking with a llama. She traveled to Australia, Nepal, Lichtenstein, and the Soviet Union and brought back artifacts, unique props, and stories to entertain us students. 

She kept her treasures locked in her classroom closet as if it were a vault. Every time she unlocked the door and searched its shelves for that day’s show and tell, I would get a feeling of liberation. We would analyze the unfamiliar artifact in her wrinkled fingers as if it were a rare gem or the Holy Grail itself, and she would instruct us to record whatever came to mind. With ardor, I put pencil to paper, each assignment kindling my desire to become a writer. 

Fast forward 40 years, and you are reading a blog post initially published as newspaper columns under the title, “Three Sides to Every Story.” My vignettes focus on life’s small but significant moments and how those moments, memories, and experiences connect us. 

While most people use the idiom, “There are two sides to every story,” my father, a South Dakota Highway Patrolman disagreed. He investigated thousands of traffic accidents and once explained two drivers can collide, and each will have a version of what happened. His report documented a third.  Eyewitnesses provided even more perspective. Somewhere in the mix was the truth.

Most of life is that way. It is a series of tiny brush strokes that - when blended - create a complete and meaningful picture.

The other day, I saw an elderly couple walking on a sidewalk near a highway. The man clipped along at a harried pace at least three steps ahead of the woman, whose mouth pouted between flushed cheeks. What were they each thinking behind their serious faces? Had they argued? Could she not keep up? Why didn’t they walk side by side?

I compared their behavior to that of my parents who lived Ephesians 4:26, keeping their bedroom door closed and their light on into the wee hours of the morning to privately resolve disagreements. Dad would never have let Mom trail behind him like that. They held hands, served each other coffee, and waltzed in the kitchen to Lawrence Welk.

The truth was I didn’t know the couple’s story. Perhaps they had run out of gas and were walking for help. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well, and they were still a distance from home. Had she simply stopped to tie her shoe and was just catching up to him? There could be at least three sides to their story.

Several years ago, my husband and I facilitated a marriage class, and I remember one young man seemed as thrilled to be there as a stone. Despite his fiancé’s encouragement to participate, he rolled his eyes and grimaced, looking rough, tough, and impatient beneath his black leather jacket and greasy bandana.

We asked the couples to take turns drawing images of what church meant to them, and I surveyed the young man with cynicism, certain I knew his story. When it was his turn to share his picture, he began by confessing he didn’t go to church much, and I crossed my arms in a verdict.

He demurely held out his drawing: a rudimentary tower with some church bells.  He said his form of worship took place every Sunday at 7 a.m. when hymns played from the steeple of a nearby church while he worked on his bike in his garage. He liked the bells because they reminded him of his mother, and that’s when he felt closest to God.

Shame on me.

Sometimes the third story is an aha!, like a Paul Harvey “rest of the story,” reminding us we aren’t always right and helping us realize there is more to the picture than we initially see.

I may not play a bamboo flute or describe adventures from the Australian outback like Mrs. Ledbetter, but I pray my blog of stories and observations connect us by witnessing life through a different perspective and acknowledging there are at least three sides to every story.