The Story-Keeper

Carly came home from Western this weekend. This trip, she actually spent most of the weekend at home. . . and not out with friends. I must say, It was really nice having her here.

We talked a lot. We sat in the kitchen and talked. We moved to the couch and talked. We went out to eat and talked. We stretched out on my bed and talked. Like I said, we talked a lot.

This talk was a little different though. She wasn't venting or complaining or sharing every little detail about a movie or tv show she had enjoyed. She wanted to hear stories. Stories about when she was a baby, about her brothers. She wanted to know about Bo when he was young. She wanted to hear about her great-grandparents. She wondered aloud why Eugene had never married, why Bo had left the mountains, why I had married her dad so young. I secretly wondered why she cared to know.

Truthfully, I come from a long line of storytellers. I've heard the quote often that if you don't tell your story someone else will. Well, in my family, for the most part, that's not a worry any of us have. We tell our story, even if no one is listening, or if parts of it aren't exactly true, or if we have to get on a stage to perform it. But, when I think about it, there aren't a lot of us who actually ask to hear the story. That's what made this time with Carly so very different.

I've read that in the past it was important for the elders to re-tell stories again and again so that those stories would not be forgotten, that they would become part of the legacy they left to their children. I hold a few of those in my own memories. . . I know that Momaw Dunn, my great-grandmother won the spelling bee by spelling the word "squeal" correctly. I also know that my dad ended up in jail (looking pretty and clean) from a run-in with the law over drag-racing. I know that my great Uncle James as a boy said they didn't have greasy ants, but piss ants. I know that Eugene was afraid of the teddy bear, and that my mom visited the entire zoo with a pair of socks tucked into the toe of her shoes. The list of stories goes on and on. . . .

There are some stories that I don't know though. I don't know how Momaw felt when Uncle Howard came to her drunk and mean. I dont know how afraid Granny Collins must have been when she found her nest almost empty and her young husband dead, cut off from her own mother and sisters. I don't know about the worry Buck must have felt when everything was riding on a crop. I don't know how lonely my dad must have felt when he left the mountains and all that he knew for the city. I don't know how frustrated my mom must have been with so much hunger for education, for something more, with so very few options open to her.

Is it better to leave out the tragedies and mistakes and broken hearts in our story? Would that make life too scary for those who travel after us? For me, I think it would have made them all more human, even more heroic in their ability to get through each day.

Any way, Carly wants to hear the stories -- the good and the bad, and I'm committed to sharing them with her, at least the stories that are mine to tell. I hope they will give her whatever she needs for her own journey. I hope that in hearing mine she will also be able to forgive me, when that is necessary.

As the only granddaughter, it falls to her to hold on to the things most valued in our family. She'll no doubt get the rings and the old photos, but she will also be given the stories, our most treasured possession of all. At 21, she has stepped up to the plate, finding her position, her responsibility to our family. When she was young, she would get so angry with Sam when he would tell her (rather smuggly) that he was "the heir to the throne." Little did she know then, that her place would be that of the story-keeper, the most important job of all.