Herbert Trammel

is such a swot, and now it's my job to change him.

My friend Mara says people can't change. The packaging might be altered--hair, clothes, make-over type stuff--but the inside stays the same.

I disagree. I say that a person can decide that it's worth being different and then do just that.

She says that learning to pick up your socks and put them in the hamper when you used to throw them on the floor is not really changing. That's altering habits. Everyone knows that habits can be broken or cultivated.

So we agreed that if a person stops being shy and starts being outgoing, that is a real change. She says a shy person is always a shy person. I say bologna, and I pronounce it like it's spelled. She says if a shy person becomes gregarious (our new word for the week) then he or she was just pretending to be shy in the first place.

Isn't personality just a habit, a pattern of thinking? If you break a bad pattern or cultivate a new one, can't you change the way you live your life? Not according to Mara. I'm oversimplifying things.

How would she know?

I'm not saying that changing is easy and that anyone can do it just on a whim. I believe that it takes work, sometimes lots of it over a long period of time, to become different on the inside. But I don't believe angry unhappy people have to stay angry and unhappy. What about Scrouge?

That's just a story, she says. And we don't know that the character's change was permanent, because there is no future to investigate.

Where do stories come from? I ask you.

I'm going to turn Herbert Trammel into a story, and then what will Miss Magnificent Mara have to say, I wonder?