Storytelling

I've always admired good story-tellers. I'm pretty good at writing stories (as I hope my readers agree) but not so good at telling them. Whenever I get a chance I tune in to Garrison Keillor's monologue on the public radio show called Prairie Home Companion. He always starts out the story with, "It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegone, my home town..." http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/about/

From my post on April 1, 2008:

"Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don't do that so much any more. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering. Despite the awesome powers of technology many of us still do not live very well. We may need to listen to each other's stories again."Quoted from:Kitchen Table Wisdom by Rachel Naomi Remenhttp://www.rachelremen.com/ktw.html

Photographs have a way of eliciting stories. Like this last Sunday when I was visiting with my parents. We were looking at the black and white snapshot in the April 13th blog post entitled Sensory Memories, Grandma and Grandpa Phillips on the back step of their farm house, my older brother Bob and I sitting with them. Dad recalled the time we went to visit them and they weren't home. Dad peeked in through the window to see a pie sitting on the kitchen counter (a very common event I might add). We got the window opened, slipped in, retrieved a piece of pie and quietly left. The next time we went to visit the window was nailed shut.

Dad can tell stories from many decades past as if they happened yesterday and with great feeling. Like the one about horse team. The neighborhood farmers would take turns helping each other bring in the harvest. There was one particular rut that other horse teams had a tendency to get stuck in. He intentionally drove their own team right into the rut (which made his own Dad fume), to demonstrate the superior strength of their team and the skill of the driver.

Then there are the war stories, the truck-driving stories, the stories derived from the daily coffee huddle at McDonalds, the story about the mulberry tree that disappeared...

Dad tells the story of when he and Mom were on a trip and he passed the long hours on the road with the telling of stories. Finally he told Mom he couldn't think of anything else to say. Mom said, "Why don't you shut up for a while then." (She's good with the one-liners like that.) But then that's a lead-in to my own story about Dad asking us to hit the O-F-F button on the TV and, "lets enjoy a moment of silence in honor of dear ol' Dad."

I have several blog posts having to do with remembering and indeed that's what storytelling helps us to do. We all have stories from our past that we'd rather not be reminded of. Those are best forgotten. Otherwise, keep telling and retelling those stories....

Happy Birthday Dad!