The Land of Storytellers

Dad and Tom.

I grew up in a family of musicians, singers and storytellers. My maternal grandmother (we called her Nanny) often regaled us with stories from her own past. Every story was told with great drama, her hands clutched to her heart during the most dramatic moments, her arms outstretched as she reached the (almost always) tragic conclusion. There was the story of her cousin who collapsed when they were playing Run Sheep Run. He fell beneath an apple tree, dying, exclaiming, “I’m done for boys!” Or the story of her baby sister, Bess, who was warned not to go wading in the creek in April but did and caught pneumonia and died. The story ended with Nanny acting out how her mother reached out her arms to try and stop the little casket from going into the ground. These were dreadful stories but told in Nanny’s beautiful, lyrical voice and with all the high drama, we loved them and asked her to tell them over and over again.

My father inherited his mother’s storytelling ability only he told very funny stories. Dad gloried in the quirks and oddities of the people in our small town. He found his fellow creatures fascinating and endlessly amusing. Daddy had the dry wit and the sardonic humor of many old time Texans. His stories were leisurely, he took his time describing the setting, drawing in his audience, and then came the big finish that would leave us all laughing. Sometimes, Dad would manage a zinger that would be remembered long after he was gone. There was the time when a man tried to commit suicide by jumping off the very tall grain elevator owned by our family. (Fortunately, he landed in a truck full of grain.) When Daddy casually mentioned this to my mom while eating lunch, she was horrified and asked if the man survived. My dad carefully wiped his mouth, took a sip of iced tea and replied, “Oh, the fellow lived but it didn’t do him a lot of good.”

So it came as no surprise that I would fall in love with the best storyteller of them all, my husband, Tom. We met at a university in Texas. He was there to study music, I was a drama major. I saw him one day crossing a parking lot and shyly called his name. He walked over to say hello and we stood there for hours in that parking lot while I listened to his stories of growing up in Chicago, attending Catholic school and trying to navigate the eddies of his mad Hungarian family. I fell in love with Tom and his stories and though I’ve heard his stories hundreds of times, I still love them (and him).