A storyteller lives in most families. My father was the magnificent one from our clan. That mantel fell to me since his passing, which means I avidly convey his stories as well as my own.
What surprises me is how eagerly these stories are received by our grandkids, particularly the verbose eight-year old (where did that influence come from?). She’d rather hear a bedtime story from the “old times” than a storybook, partly because she can sweep through books by herself now. Books lie under her domain, so to speak. My stories do not.
A good story can come out of anything, from the process of opening a stubborn jar of olives to a wild rafting trip down the New River. (I’ve never rafted anywhere, although I did jump out of an airplane.) Stories can be made up (“Would you like to hear one about river rafting?”), but the best ones spring from our experience. They evoke occasions that are indelible in our memories.
A small story from my college days has been popular lately with the grandkids. You might call it a “seasonal story” as it regards an autumn morning in the early 1970s when my roommate at Hollins College and I crossed the road from the senior apartments to the gorgeous antebellum campus.
We were in hot pursuit of breakfast, served in the historic octagonal dining hall. Our path curved along a feeder brook to “Tinker Creek”—a creek made famous through alumna Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer-Prize winning anthology. The path was dotted by firs and large deciduous trees: elms, oaks, and maples.
I wasn’t so keen about knowing trees in those days, but I think the tree central to this story was a maple. For several days Ellen and I had marveled as this tree flashed a mantel of blinding reds and golds. You may have a similar tree outside of your window now, reveling in its final act of glory. At any rate, on that grey morning a serious breeze suddenly came up as we crossed the road. I say breeze, but it turned into a gust so ferocious, it seemed to shoot out of a fire hose. We instantly regretted we didn’t have thicker jackets.
But never mind, because that gust was aimed at that tree. Within two minutes, the entirety of her glorious leaves was blasted away, sheets of red and orange tumbling unceremoniously to the ground. Honestly, a stream of compressed air couldn’t have done a better job.
We stood with our mouths open, glancing around to see if anyone else was witnessing this scene! No one was. Taking our eyes from the now bare tree, we looked at each other in astonishment, and hastened to the dining hall to tell our tale. The group of friends with whom we breakfasted were diving into eggs and grits.
“Hey y’all, you won’t believe this!” we shouted. Doing our best to retell the tale, we even reenacted part of it (I think Ellen was the tree and I, the wind). Our friends nodded politely and probably said something like “Gee, that’s weird” or “Wow.”
You see, we couldn’t bring this story to life because it wasn’t a story yet. It was a narrative account—a narrative without much evidence to back it up. One gal asked if there was anything still to see, but since the campus was ankle-deep in leaves, what could we point to? So, after respectfully listening, our friends returned to their food and we drifted off to get our coffee and toast.
Much time has passed, but I never forgot that tree. I bet Ellen hasn’t either. I sometimes imagine her telling this story to her own kinfolk, nearly a half-century later.
Alas, we in the United States are no longer a nation of storytellers, despite having a wonderful legacy of stories. We possess those native to this soil, those brought here by our immigrant ancestors, and those spun from the wild and wooly acts that built this country. Instead, we have recoiled from nearly all of them, especially our national narrative, and look dubiously at anyone who still enshrines them.
Consequently, a host of individual stories that weathered time are now bashed as “offensive.” If that label does not manage to extinguish them, then a vicious “politically incorrect” axe will do the job. Ruefully I wonder how today’s touchy pundits would respond if dropped into the audience at the magnificent phenomenon known as Yiddish Theater that speckled New York in the years around 1900. They might try to hide under the seats!
For that matter what would those pundits do if they heard my daddy’s stories? Oh my! Well, I can tidy up most of them up, but not all.
How do you prettify this story from his time working in the mid 1930s for New York Scientific? The company produced and shipped materials for high-school science labs, so my father’s duties including wrapping packages (he wrapped like a laser beam and routinely undid my Christmas wrappings to show me how it should be done). But he also had the duty of embalming critters for science labs, from bugs and frogs to cats. Can you tell where this story is going?
It’s true: whenever there weren’t enough cats to fill the orders, he and his coworker were told to take to the streets late at night and round up strays. Sometimes they were actual strays, daddy said: hungry, miserable, and (he added) needing to be put out of their misery. But other times, they were belled, collared, and groomed pussy cats clearly belonging to someone who had let them out onto the fire escapes for a bit of midnight air.
Could you imagine me telling this story now in public? Wait, I just did. But it’s a good story, isn’t it? Still the outrage it would cause today wouldn’t dissipate even if I reminded those outraged that it happened during The Great Depression. A person like my father making eight dollars a week did not get to ask a lot of questions—not when a line of men out the door would have taken his job in a flash.
Winter is upon us. I heard there might be snow in the North Carolina mountains tonight. As we all move our energies indoors, pick a time and place under the comfort of a cozy quilt, by the fire, or around the dinner table (best lit with a candle or two), and ask someone in your family to conjure up a good story. Kids love to tell stories, but they may not automatically have the skills to do it well. So give them chances to practice the delivery of stories along with hearing them.
And if you find a tree still clad in her stunning cloak, watch over the next few days to see how she sheds it. Maybe, just maybe, you will be lucky enough to be standing nearby when the tree steps out of her autumn mantle and reveals her dark, intricate weave of winter branches.
Oral storytelling is a gift my mother’s father passed on, to her, and to her four daughters. Grandpa Elmer could spin a yarn seemingly out of thin air; you could safely assume if he was lingering at the dinner table after the dishes were cleared, he has a tale to tell. His humor often went over my head as a child, but I understood his sense of timing; I knew when we getting to the hook. Nothing gave him more satisfaction than eliciting laughs or sighs with his stories.
My mother turned her talent for storytelling to sharing our family history. She could describe her grandparents’ farm and general store with exquisite detail; as a child listening to her memories, I could practically taste the cold pop she was allowed when she visited the store. She told us sisters countless stories about her childhood, and her parents’ childhoods; she learned our father’s family history and shared that too.
And growing up, we narrated our shared experiences as a Navy family moving all over the U.S., comparing Christmases in Bremerton to birthdays in San Diego; recalling camping on My Rainier during an earthquake and trying hula dancing in Hawaii.
It wasn’t until I met my now-husband that I learned not every family shares this tradition. Trying to draw family fables from my husband’s parents–almost stereotypically English in their reticence to share…well, anything–was met with awkward silence. My husband took to this tradition quickly, however, and absorbed our family stories as his own. We added to them, too, as we entered young married life but stayed in my hometown as my mother was diagnosed with cancer a few months after our wedding.
When we lost her, after a long, heroic 6-year fight, my three younger sisters were still in their teens. For eleven years now, we have continued telling her stories, our stories, and crafting new ones, so now my own children and nephews can tell us about college- age Grandma Linda trying to bottle beer in her parents’ basement and having every last cap blow off from too much fermentation…or five year old me marching over to our neighbor’s yard early one morning in April to cut every.single.daffodil growing there so I could present them to my mother on her birthday…or how I rode my bike after a rainshower when I was 8, my mother warning me not to race down hills because the streets were wet, and lost control, flew over the handlebars, and knocked out two baby teeth.
My kids eat this stuff up. And the stories only get better with age.
I was immediately enthralled by the idea of a suddenly bare tree. How wonderful that you experienced that moment. Thanks for letting me imagine it.
Love your colorful stories anytime, any place. My son will add the little mini-marshmellows to his hot chocolate, while I will add a shot of Jack Daniels to my mug. But, please, let that not bother you and continue with your stories…….
Lately we’ve watched historian Ruth Goodwin’s and archeologists Alex Langlands’ and Peter Ginn’s seasonal series of The Victorian Farm (watch the Victorian Christmas of season 2), The Tudor Monastery Farm, and now of The Edwardian Farm in Morewellan Quay in Devon shire, all available on Amazon Prime. They fit this post-pandemic Fall season particularly well and the real-life stories are imaginative and catchy…..
Carol, you have proven to be an excellent storyteller–it seems to come naturally.
Every family should have a story teller–grandparents are the best go-tos because they have experienced more of life.
The fact that you have a granddaughter whose apples haven’t fallen far from the tree speaks well of the future.
Happy Thanksgiving!
I am continuously being confronted with the idea of storytelling lately. I think the universe is trying to smack me in the face with it, lol. We unfortunately do not have a storyteller in the family anymore, they died before ever getting a chance to tell most of them. Ive tried to spin a story or two with my children but it feels choppy. This wonderful article and the numerous other storytelling smacks in the face have made me realize I need to keep trying!
I’m a professional storyteller and author. Some of you know me from projects Carol, Hank, my wife, Randy, and I have created together. I came to this calling from a family of storytellers: my father, especially, who shared stories with us from his life, and stories from classic literature and history, retold in his own words (which led me to my own career); but also my mother, who read to us, and her father, our grandfather, whose stories were so loved and so frequently repeated in our household that we all chimed in on certain key phrases.
But here is why I am writing to you today. The year that my grandmothers turned 80, Randy and I interviewed them and recorded the results. Subsequently, I made copies and distributed them throughout the family because the grandmothers told the stories of our families, going back generations, and of their own lives with the grandfathers. What added to the tellings was to have these stories told in their own voices and phrasing.
There are numerous books available TO YOU to help you do this same thing. One of my favorites is called Your Life and Times, a particularly well-organized paperback in which each page has a prompt to lead you into memories… and stories. If you look among similar books, you will find one that works best for you personally. Of course, you needn’t stay with the prompts; let your memories lead you. But this is a wonderful way into your stories, and works, and you will find yourself recalling details or entire episodes you hadn’t thought of for years. Also, for those families in which the younger generation and the elders are not living in close proximity, this is a way to share the contents and the personalized way of telling.
What matters is that you share these irreplaceable stories — and yourself. I have found over many decades of telling stories that even those people who are rather locked up or introverted have stories they want to to tell: Oscar Hammerstein II said that everyone had at least one song-worthy story.
Don’t wait. Share the stories now.
What a great article! Thank you for sharing, Carol! My dad is the story teller in our family, and we always anticipated the coming stories when we finished dinner and had nothing else to rush off to. Stories about his claustrophobia in the engine of an airplane as he worked on it, driving his grandpa’s tractor into the support beam of the barn, and the stubborn donkey that wouldn’t go. They are part of the family heritage!
Also, it’s pretty awesome that Jim Weiss posted on here! 😉