Telling Stories
Some people grow up wanting to be writers. I never did. I perhaps have a compulsion to write, but it wasn’t a vocation or an avocation. I just like stories and sometimes I have to tell them myself.
My parents never read to me when I was a child, but I knew books were important. This was a time long ago, when all of us had to trudge home for lunch, no matter the weather, as there was no cafeteria at school. It was expected that our mothers would be home, waiting for their adoring and adorable children.
Our lunches were always tomato soup and either peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or toasted cheese. My mother would put food on the table for the four of us, the ones she dropped haphazardly into the world, then sit down at the table with us and read her book. She probably assumed nothing exciting was happening in our lives at school. But even if there were, she’d never know or care to know.
But all children want to hear stories, whether it’s of times long ago, family moments, or, like my grandfather, stories of Carolyn and Joey Rabbit. Most nights when we were in Oneida, before we were moved to our own bed to sleep, we’d curl up with Grandpa and he’d weave all these fabulous adventures about what was happening with Carolyn and Joey Rabbit; and, boy, did they get into some fixes. But he always got them out of those fixes with relish. I wonder now if he was just embellishing on the Peter Rabbit stories and substituting us instead. I don’t know where my sister was in all of this, but she was always “fragile” and really never roughhoused like the two of us did.
My father, for all his faults, used to take me on his knee and tell me stories of Carolyn Ann McFinty. Oh my, they were exciting! I was in the Arctic or I was in the jungle or wandering through the desert. Somehow I’d always be in a perilous situation and breathlessly waiting for him to get me out of it. He always did. Then one day the stories stopped, and I was quite sad about it.
I needed stories to feed my life. Dinners en famille were awful, mainly because my mother was a terrible cook. We were forced to eat everything on our plate or we were confined to the bathroom, with our plates of cooling food, until we did. However, redemption of a sort came as I listened to my father talk about his days at the lab and all the personalities involved. It was a running serial of interesting and sometimes erratic people; and it always made me unhappy when he had nothing to say. Where was the plot line!
My mother barely communicated with her children. Why she had four of us, I could never understand. If you don’t want to engage with your children, don’t have them. She did take us weekly to the library in another town so I applaud her for that.
After my father died, and I would visit, I’d catch my mother as she was finishing breakfast with her coffee and her cigarette. She’d always buy Entenmann’s crumb cake for me and chocolate doughnuts for my sister. Why Entenmann’s doesn’t sell crumb cake in the Midwest is beyond me! Usually, we had nothing to say to one another, but if I asked her about a relative, someone I recalled from my youth, like Reuben and his wife growing gladiolas, she’d start talking about all our relatives up in Oneida. It would bring me back to my childhood and bring her back to hers also.
My husband was a great storyteller. His life was a lot more interesting than my middle class existence. (See my novel “Flowers of the Desert”) Born in Baghdad, he traveled with his family to Tehran, to Israel; and then he went on to Princeton, where I met him. Here was another person with a large extended family, like mine in Oneida, with adventures and scandals galore.
And where was I in all this? I never read at the table, but did I ever tell my children stories of my life? Were there stories I could tell without pain? I read to them definitely, both my husband I did. With my grandchild I would repeat all the fairy tales I remembered and was quite annoyed that he didn’t particularly appreciate “Three Billy Goats Gruff.” He preferred Jack and his beanstalk.
For my children, their father’s life has come alive, but I think mine remains hidden. Perhaps until now.