We Are the Stories We Tell
My mother-in-law recently turned 80. We had a birthday party for her with all her kids, lots of her grandkids and great-grandkids and even family who flew in from out of state. Like my own Mom, she is a regular reader of this blog and sometimes comments. Today she read a recent post I made about my upcoming trip to Texas and shared a story it inspired.
I love Texas! I lived there from age 2 to 6. My mother tells me I loved the tamale trucks that would go by the house. They would play music just like ice cream trucks. But I didn’t care about the ice cream. I wanted tamales!
Our little house was in front of a dairy. Maybe that is why I love cows!
I remember always shaking our shoes out to be sure the wasn’t a scorpion in them. My mother tells me that I intentionally picked up a scorpion to be stung. I thought she would call my daddy to come home (that is what she did when my brother Tony was stung. ) My father was in Japan when I got stung. We got to join him a year later.
We were in San Antonio right after WWll.
As long as I've known my mother-in-law she's told these wonderful stories about growing up in a military family and her larger-than-life father, an Italian immigrant, Ivy League graduate and US Army officer. I never got to meet him but the way the entire family, including my Wonder Woman, idolize him, I can tell that he was a very special person.
All my life I have enjoyed listening to the stories people tell. My grandmother would enthrall me with tales of cooking on a wood stove for her six brothers who plowed with mules all day on her Dad's farm. She told me of milking cows, making butter and cooking biscuits by the dozens.
My Dad is full of stories about growing up in the 50s and 60s, serving in Vietnam and teaching at the Army's flight school at Ft. Rucker. My Mom tells the best stories about growing up well-loved but poor in a farming family out in the country where people used chicken feed sacks to make undergarments and hot water bottles taken to bed at night to warm it up sometimes froze on the floor overnight if they slipped from under the covers.
I have my own collection of tales I regaled my children with when they were younger, of the farm work I did as a teenager and the crazy things I encountered as a prison guard looking for escaped inmates in my 20s.
I don't know how many generations all of those stories will last. My grandmother died almost 30 years ago, and I still remember minute details of events she related. Each of us is a collection of the things that have happened to us. What we choose to share will define us to an extent. I feel very fortunate to know so much about my own family history and that of my wife. I love listening to the younger generation as they develop their own set of tales. I have little events from each of my five children and 13 grandchildren that I like to toss over in my mind when I miss them, whether it be my youngest daughter wearing her Winnie the Pooh slippers to sleepovers or the time my granddaughter jumped into the pool without her water wings and had to be rescued by her dad or the days spent with my step-daughter in the hospital during her long, long labors prior to giving birth. I remember it all and it brings me joy.
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