During one of the sessions at today’s GoGreen Conference the audience was asked to turn to a stranger and tell her a story that’s told and retold in our family about one of our family members. I turned to Lisa Watson, of Cupcake Jones fame, and told her the following story which I’ve been asked to retell here:

Before heading into surgery for testicular cancer my father-in-law said to the nurse, “I sure wish I would have bought that boat.”

“What boat’s that?” she asked politely.

“The one I looked at last weekend.”

(pause)

“Because I won’t have the balls to do it tomorrow.”

Lisa Watson and I had a good laugh, and when the speaker asked audience members to tell the story that had been told to them, she recounted my father-in-law’s story. There was a brief pause before the room exploded in laughter.

The point of the exercise, for those who are interested, is that a two-minute story tells you a lot about the subject of the story. I could have told you, “My father-in-law was one of the funniest men I’ve ever known, even when life threw him curves,” but you wouldn’t remember me or my father-in-law, nor would you know as much about him as you do from the story.

And you know you’ll retell it and remember it for a very long time.