My earliest storytelling memories are of my dad and Uncle Jim, sitting on the front porch, each drinking a beer, passing the time telling tales, as men often do. Jim would talk about the dredging jobs he had been on, in the wilds of Alaska, while Dad would talk about pubs in Ireland, during the war, or street fights growing up in East St. Louis.
I felt grown-up during those sessions, by virtue of being allowed to stay and listen, me just being a little kid of six or seven, warm and protected by the men in my life, smiling and laughing when they would say something funny, laughing as the men did.
It occurs to me now that when those stories were being told, this being maybe 1955 or so, both men had traveled considerably by then, both men hailing from Iowa, both men in Europe during World War 2, Jim working in Alaska, some serious miles before I even got the training wheels off my bike.
Dad loved to drive, his favorite times, I believe, when he would drive me and Mom on the yearly vacation, taking backroads down to Seaside, Oregon, or similar blacktop ribbons north to Canada, or back to Iowa to see family, long stretches of wheels humming, Mom often falling asleep, Dad using that time to talk about random matters, his son in rapt attention, soaking up the exquisite sharing of father to son. Most of what I know about family history was learned on those drives, after darkness had fallen, our headlights illuminating small paths of roadway, the nighttime embracing our car. Storytelling at its finest, my friends, a fine tradition, practiced by every nationality, before nations even, the tribes and nomads, hunters and gatherers, telling history in the shape of a story.
Perhaps that’s where my love of storytelling comes from; perhaps that’s where my love of traveling comes from. I know not, but I do know there is a nomad inside of me, and a storyteller, and I can’t think of finer gifts for my father and Uncle Jim to give to me.
I think of today’s generation, surely there is some clever title for them, like Generation X or some such fabricated label, and I wonder if they are told histories by their relatives, during breaks from social media, of course, and if they are not, are we as a civilization poorer for it? But then I think lighten up a bit, Billy Boy; it’s all storytelling, is it not? The Facebook and the Instagram, the graffiti and the street art, the ramblings of coffeehouse poets and the deep dissertations of the Nobel Prize winners . . . and the sculptors and the cave drawings, the historians and the tribal chiefs, all part of that overused word tapestry of life, now I’m getting warm and fuzzies, the proverbial goosebumps moving down my arms just thinking about the fact that I am part of that tradition, and it makes me proud, and I think I just might keep on doing it.
And I hope you do as well. Fahrenheit 451 will remain a fiction as long as we do. Governments can ban until hell freezes over, but as long as storytellers tell stories, our histories will not die.
