Want To Hear A Story?

"People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another."

    

 - Studs Terkel

Who doesn't? I mean who doesn't want to hear a story. Stories have been around, and I love to tell them. When you have lived this long(and I mean LONG!) you have plenty of fodder to fascinate or bore people, take your choice. My family would be the first to say, "Yeah, he talks too much!" 8-))

But that is ok. I could tell you of the time my Dad hoisted me on the back of a calf in Arizona up at the Mountain Cabin, or maybe the time, when a young lad, I was crawling across a fallen tree to get over a medium sized creek on a hike in the mountains and rammed a broken branch, just missing my eye, into the side of my head. Those are all fun to tell and of course, the storyteller can really exaggerate if he/she wants to. But how about those days when I would fish for crawdads down in the irrigation box among the orange trees in my  home town. What is a crawdad?Well it looks like a miniature lobster, brown and has claws that can deliver a sharp pinch. How about when I raised chickens, and saved a neat little chicken from his carnivorous brothers and sisters, and I trained him to sit on my arm. How cool is that?--a full grown chicken sitting on your arm. Has that ever happened to you? Stories, if true, often reflect our life and its activities. I think often writers use their life experiences to develop their stories. ("A Movable Feast") by Ernest Hemingway. Then there's the time Barber Shop owner Charlie(I was a shoeshine boy in his barbershop) told me to go down the street to the furniture store and see how much they would pay for the hair clippings that I would sweep up from the Shop floor, to use to stuff their sofas and chairs. 8-)) Good old Charlie, really got one over on me with that! And no they didn't pay!! Yes, I went down the street and asked them!!

And then there was the time I fell in the lake trying to tie up my Dad's boat as we came into the dock! Now that was really funny, and did I ever make a big splash! I remember my Sister and I as young kiddos, skating around the block there in my home town, with our clamp on rollerskates, what a fabulous time, even when I fell and tore the knee out of my jeans and bloodied my knee. It was superbly fun! I know, I know, I didn't finish any of the stories. But maybe someday.........

And then there was the time when I visited my Grandfather and we went out in his workshop, had some of the worst coffee in the world 8-))) one could ever have, and he told me a bit about his life. What a fab storytime that was. He is gone now, but I have that story forever in my mind.

I remember going to the Ranch in Arizona, and the first thing my Sister and I would say to another Granpa was: "Can you get the horses, Darlin' and Chub for us so we can ride?" And he would!

"The story — from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace — is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories."
    

 - Ursula K. Le Guin 

Well thus goes the story-telling for today. Hey, I want to tell you a story: The first time we saw our Grandsons after they were born. Now that was a thrilling story! Now we see them on the computer screen when we do Skype or Facetime. How wonderful is that? And seeing our daughters, just after their arrival into this world at their respective hospitals. Wow! How cool is that!! Later from the Story-Den.

Someday maybe I will finish the above stories(now they are teasers).