Storying you along

Mother and I were talking today while my youngest was doing his penmanship lesson, and we were remembering old stories. Family stories. Some of my friends think it odd that I tell stories about my parents' childhoods, or my grandparents' childhoods, as though they were my own stories. In a way, they are. I've heard them all my life; they are as real and as valuable to me as my own experiences.

People don't practice the idea of an oral family history anymore. I don't know quite why it's gone out of vogue; possibly because Americans have become so peripatetic nowadays that it's impossible. Maybe it's television? Maybe it's the fact of universal literacy (though it's hardly universal). But whatever the reason, people just don't do it. They don't tell their children stories about their childhoods; family stories, both good and bad, are not passed down. Or, if they are, they're not held onto and cherished like they used to be.

We do it. Some of my finest memories of childhood involve "storying," as my granny called it. I can clearly remember being about nine years old, and it's dead of winter. We would all get up in the morning, and the house was COLD. So we all gathered in the kitchen, where the stove was going strong. My mother would make fried apples and big catshead biscuits. Daddy would thumb a biscuit for honey, then we'd sit in a semi-circle around him, and he and Mom would swap stories.

Some of the stories were scary, like my great aunt Keziah being haunted by a poltergeist, and being accused of being a witch. Some were odd, like how my great grandfather came home from the Civil War, and married Wife No. 2, without ever actually bothering to divorce Wife No. 1, or how my great great uncle was murdered in a local whorehouse. Some were pretty damned cool: the midwife who attended when my granny was born was Granny Hatfield, matriarch of the "Hatfield and McCoys" Hatfields.

My sister Lil likes the rascals in our family: one of our relatives went to prison for counterfeiting, using hand drawn bank notes (how do you hand draw a bank note?). One survived the Depression by being a professional poker hustler. There was this one who committed two ax murders and then fled to Nebraska, but we haven't established if he was a direct relative, or just a cousin.

Personally, I prefer the war stories. How my dad, despite having Cerebral Palsy, served as counter-espionage in WWII (it was a lot less glamorous than it sounds). How my cousin Jack got to attend the Nuremburg trials. My personal favorite: my great grandfather served under Grant in the Civil War, a good Union boy; my husband's great grandfather was a Captain in the Army of South Carolina, a good Rebel.

Yes, the Civil War is still alive and well. ;-)

Since Daddy died, fourteen years ago, my sisters and Mom and I have been trying to collect the old stories and get them written down, before they are lost. We have a small leather journal that gets passed around between the five of us, and when we have a memory of good story, saying, whatever, it gets jotted down. That way, they'll be here, still alive, when my mom is gone, and even when my sisters and I are only distant memories.

It's a good thing.

One of my favorite entries, and fairly typical....

When Daddy was a little boy, he spent several years in hospitals. They were doing surgeries on his legs, trying to make him walk more normally. When he was about twelve, he went to Chicago for an experimental surgery, and spent about eleven months in the children's ward. While there, a young boy was in the bed next to him, and they got to talking. They revealed that their daddies had both been in World War I. Being boys, of course, there was a great deal of bragging going on. Daddy was very proud to say, "my daddy was stationed at such and so, and fought here and wherever," etc. The next line of course was, "What company was your daddy with?"

The boy's answer: "The other side."

And two more I just typed up this morning, to send along to a friend (and thus setting my mind onto this path)....

There was a preacher in my Granny Clarkson's church who, obviously, didn't want to curse in church. However, he also was very bad for getting totally caught up in what he was preaching. So anyway, one day he's preaching about Samson fighting the Philistines. He gets to the part where he's supposed to say that Samson used the jawbone of an ass to kill a thousand Philistines. It came out, "Samson, he used the jawbone of a donkey, and whipped the ass off a thousand Philistines."

My Granny's church was having a pageant, and as part of that, they were going to have a tableau of the Wise Virgins and the Foolish Virgins. They had gathered all the young people together, and were assigning roles. This one boy was sitting with a girl of rather notorious reputation. This boy raised his hand when they asked for volunteers.

"You can't play a virgin," the preacher said to the boy.

The boy responded by pointing at the girl beside him. "If she can play a virgin, then I can," was his response.