Tell me a story

I was reading an article the other day on storytelling and on how this generation of parents has lost the knack to tell a story and that our children do not even know to ask. Sure, they'll ask to be a read a story and with the abundance of books most families have that is quite easy. This is true with me, I couldn't tell a story off the top of my head to save my life and I would be hard pushed to be able to even retell a story from something I had read or heard. "Um..so Goldilocks sat in Papa's chair..or was it Mama's...ah, maybe it was baby bears, hear, I bet it was all three..." There's no fluid motion with me, just like in my writing. Odd, since I loved to write as a child and won plenty of creative writing awards. Sometimes we lose the few talents we actually have.

My father is a storyteller and so is my son. At the age of three he told me two stories that I won't soon forget. One was that he had had a dream (and who knows maybe he did) that he was a grandfather and his grandaughter died in a car accident. He went into great detail, describing places and all sorts of things well above a three year olds understanding. Another time he told me that he had been on the Titanic and had died in the water and his wife survived. This was before he knew what the Titanic was, and how he ever came up with the name of that boat is beyond me. I had a friend who believed he actually was on the Titanic, I said he was just repeating something he must have heard somewhere. In playschool his teacher told me he was always telling tall tales, and at Easter she wrote him a note saying she loved his stories. I said "She means he's a great liar." Which he was. And still is, in fact. Today, his teachers most common comments about him are that he is a great storyteller and can dictate pages and pages of stories and that to get out of trouble, he will start telling her some long winded tale.

But this post was primarily supposed to be about my dad who as I said earlier is truly a great storyteller. When we asked to be read to as children he would tell us a story instead, often some Celtic myth, but more often about his childhood in Belfast. We heard stories about all the broken bones he had, about my granny sewing his toe back on with just a needle and thread. There were stories about stealing a gypsy's horse and about him setting fire to his younger brother's hair and his mother beating him with a hanger for his efforts, about how he would do the older kids homework for money, about his summers spent in Donegal speaking nothing but Irish and the trouble you would get in if they heard you using English. There were stories about his relatives and friends and every single house on every single street that he ever lived on.

There were stories he never told of course, stories I had to hear from other family members. Last summer my aunt told me that when he was 12 or 13 he tried out for a boys choir based out of London. They picked two boys from Northern Ireland, and one of them was my dad. When they arrived at the house to tell him, my granny said no, he wouldn't be allowed to go. I still don't know why she did this, when I asked my dad he said oh, she was just worried about me being in England and the travelling I would have to do. Odd, since at 15 he was travelling throughout Ireland working. Perhaps she just didn't want to lose the paycheque my dad equalled. He also never told me that he started drinking at 14, this I was told by a social worker when he was in hospital for a broken hip and attempted suicide. He always did say drink was the devil, and it definitely did ruin him.

Still, I would like these stories, the good and the bad, but he seems hesitant to record them or to write them out. My father is Taylor and Liam's only tie to Ireland and to that little bit of family history that will soon be gone. Of course, they can hear William's stories about growing up outside of Belfast, but his stories are much different than the ones my father has, different times and different areas.

My dad will be 64 this coming summer. I wonder how much longer there is for me to convince him that there are still stories to be told, still children to hear them. His father died at 66, his mother spent the last 10 years of her life with Alzheimer's. Memories of long ago events remained, but the interest to tell them in detail certainly wasn't there. I hope I can get him to do this. It would be much easier if he was like my mother's father who is huge on family history, and has actually created a family archive to be passed on one day (to which of the five grandchildren, I have no idea.)

One day, I might actually convince him. I should just go out and buy him a tape recorder. But would he use it?