TOP THIS

By Kenneth Heard

Maybe it’s my humble Minnesota upbringing that keeps me from being too boastful.

It could be that I’m generally shy with strangers in public and am not that keen on sharing too much personal information.

Or maybe it’s merely the fact that I really have not had that eventful or exciting a life.

Whatever the reason, I seem to constantly lose in the game of Besting the Other Person’s Story. I don’t just lose. I come in dead last.

You know the game. When people get together and one offers some tale of medical mishaps, financial distress or other claims of mayhem, invariably, someone else will have a personal anecdote of even worse fare.

Not to sound sexist, but women often do this when relating childbirth. One woman may say she was in labor for 16 hours. Another will pipe in and say her childbirth lasted 20 hours and no one at the hospital could find the doctor. Then a third will say she gave birth while in the back of a stalled Honda Accord on a lonely stretch of Kansas highway while packs of coyotes bayed nearby.

And, we have a winner.

I once worked at a newspaper where the “Top This” game was played constantly. I could sneeze and say offhandedly that I must be allergic to pollen in the Arkansas spring air. Our advertising salesperson would then regale us with a tale of her sinus surgery that involved drilling through her nose to alleviate pressure on her sinus cavity.

The fact that I always lose these things was very evident recently when I waited at the Walnut Ridge Amtrak station for my wife’s train to return from her trip to Chicago. I tend to arrive quite early for things like that and, realizing I had at least 45 minutes before the train was scheduled to roll into Lawrence County, I had two options.

I could either sit in the darkened car in the parking lot or I could go into the lit depot and read a while.

I chose the second and anticipated reading the book I brought with me.

Instead, I found the depot full of travelers … and they were playing Top This.

“I got in a wreck on the road between Biggers and Reyno,” one man said, referring to a stretch of highway in Randolph County. He sat back in the plastic depot chair, smugly as if expecting to win. “They flew me to Memphis in a helicopter, and I died on the way over. They had to shock me back to life.”

The second fellow topped that story, though.

“My car rolled over five times in Clay County once, and it took them two hours to get me out,” he said. “I died twice on the flight to Memphis.”

They then looked at me.

I put my book down and thought.

“A truck once backed into my car in the Walmart parking lot and left a dent in it,” I said meekly.

I paused.

“But I wasn’t in the car when it happened.”

The others stared.

The noise from the frequent freight trains that went through the area stopped. Even the chirping crickets and the constant whine of the gazillion mosquitoes that lived at the station ceased.

“Dang,” the first guy said, shaking his head.

They then returned to their tales of woe.

I’m not sure why people play Top This with negative stories. You’d think they’d rather brag about good things and not disasters. I’d much rather try to top the other person’s story about how much he won in the lottery than how many stitches I may have received during some medical procedure.

Perhaps it’s a lack of self-esteem. If they can’t be better than someone else, maybe they can be worse.

All I know is that if I ever get into a discussion about car wrecks with others, I better have died three times if I want to be a contender for Top This.