Dead Ends

For every time I find a fabled life, a person once known to exist only inside a fairly tale or folk tale or nursery rhyme or even a tongue twister,  there are dozens … well, more than dozens of times that I follow a lead and find nothing. There will be a name or a story or a life event that looks promising and causes me to dig deeper, invest time, until it becomes apparent that there is no “echo” of a fable. There are many trails that end quickly, and there are some trails that I follow for a long time before they end empty of the echo. Despite the fact that I set these aside as not being a part of whatever this is that I’m doing, there are some that I cannot really shake, inquiries that stick with me, almost as if they too have a role to play in this story, the story of my searching. They are not fabled lives; of that I am sure. But some of them are, at the same time, not irrelevant. They don’t ring true to a fable, but they ring nevertheless, and I pay a little more attention to the failure.