The Need for Stories

 I have been told I should get back to blogging, so here goes:

I've been thinking a lot lately about this whole business of reading, writing, yearning for stories and knowledge, and what drives it inside of us. Stories have been around since man came along. Our ancestors told stories through folklore and cave paintings. The need to hear and learn about other people, places, adventures is part of being human and having big brains. Our big brain is what separates us from other creatures on earth. Other animals have the capacity to learn. You can teach your dog to fetch or to do his business outside, but humans are unique in having stories in our brains that we retain, enjoy, repeat. (On another note: I would really love for my Sam-cat to tell me a story. The thought of that gives me a smile.) 

I found this need for story when I was a young child. I loved hearing my grandparents tell about their childhoods, or my parents tell about theirs, hearing Daddy's "war stories." Since I was a baby boomer, those war stories abounded in my childhood. I can't think of a single man in my orbit who had not taken part in some way in World War II, so it was still all around me, and I was curious for the details. 

Before I could read I pestered everybody in my house to read for me. My mother once told me I drove them crazy on car trips asking what every sign we passed said. Back then, people didn't expect children to learn to read before they started to school. I think I was probably ready to learn much earlier, but I didn't come from a scholarly family. They were Depression era, hardworking, public-school educated rule-followers. If the rules were that kids learned to read in first grade, then they weren't going to start any sooner, and kindergarten was something unheard of in my world. 

Two weeks before I started first grade, my mother sat me down to the kitchen table with a piece of paper and a pencil and taught me to write my name. She made me memorize our address and phone number, and the address and phone number of my grandparents, since they lived in the same city and could substitute in an emergency. I learned those lessons so well--TE5-0170 and TU2-6926, respectively--that there are still stamped in my brain, 60-plus years later. 

My first grade teacher, Miss Hopper, sat the class in small circles, handed out our primer, See Spot Run, and we learned slowly how to sound out the simple, LARGE print words on the pages. I adored that part of our classes. As far as I was concerned, I could have sat in that circle for the entire day. I couldn't wait to read that whole book to see what happened. I'm sure it was predictable. I didn't care. 

However, I didn't come from a family of readers. We had a set of World Book Encyclopedias and that was about it. Once Daddy went up in the attic and brought down a battered, water-stained children's picture book called Water Babies. He must have known it was up there and climbed up there to find it for me. I read that one book over and over, memorized it backwards and forwards. Mom set me up with a subscription to Highlights for Children. It came once a month, and within a day or two, I had read all the stories, worked all the dot-to-dot puzzles, and colored all the pictures of farm animals, etc. I loved my Highlights! I really think my accountant parents didn't know what to make of this child of theirs with the hunger for books. I'm pretty sure they would have better understand if I had been a math-whiz like they both were, but they did their best for me. The whole family did.

Twice a month, my brother walked me down to the end of the block to the church parking lot where the book mobile stopped. He helped me get my first library card there, and allowed me to check-out three books. He was five years older and thought he knew what was best for me. I thought he knew, too, so I followed his rule, but I was always ready for three more books within a couple of days. 

By third grade, the family was giving me Nancy Drew books every birthday and at Christmas. By the time I outgrew them, I had the whole set. And by the time I was through with all six years at my elementary school, I had read most of the books on the shelves in our tiny library room. By about 5th grade, I started to write my own stories, in a spiral-bound notebook I bought at the drug store. Oh, how I wish I still had all those early writings. Only one has survived--a romanticized version of Ponce De Leon. I was already writing historical fiction, even way back then. 

There is no point to this narrative, other than to come back around to the need people have for story, for the neatness a story gives--beginning, middle, end--to help us make sense of the world we live in, the people we encounter, to escape to places we may never go otherwise, to situations far afield of our own lives. And of course, to learn. The smartest people I know are readers. My dad probably never read an entire book, but he was always reading something, science journals, stock market reports, newspapers and all those magazines he subscribed to. His accountant mind required that he date-stamp the upper right corner of those magazines, and check off the articles in the Table of Contents as he finished them. 

When Dad was in his late 80s he was still learning. We had long backyard conversations over a beer maybe, or a glass of wine, while watching his dogs. We discussed astronomy, foreign wars, foreign places, politics, and the psychology of human nature. Often, he surprised me with his knowledge of current fads and trendy subjects. I remember he watched the entire royal wedding when William married Kate, and talked about it for days afterwards. Another story, understanding the world, and always striving for knowledge. I hope to do the same.

Onward...

Outside the Comfort Zone

When I was a little girl I was afraid of the dark. Mother put a nightlight in my room to try to alleviate this, but I believe the nightlight made things worse. I had a four-poster bed and the posts cast snake shadows on the walls. Once, my foam rubber pillow slipped off the edge of the bed, rested against the nightlight, and started a smoldering fire. The smoke woke Mother and there was a lot of alarm about this incident for a while. Then Daddy found a different kind of nightlight, one that lasted, I know, for fifteen years. It was small, cylindrical, and casts snake shadows just like the first one had. But we had no more fires.

I have never been a great sleeper. I fall asleep fast but staying asleep has always been a problem. As a child, I remember waking in the middle of the night, most nights, terrified of the shadows, afraid to peer out the window by my bed, a window by the way, that was usually open. This was before we had air-conditioning, and in Corpus Christi, we needed cool air far more than we usually needed heat. After a while, I would get out of bed, creep to my open doorway. Mine was the first room off the hallway. I would glance towards the living room. There was a window there that reflected light from the streetlamp on our corner, and those reflections looked like demons to me. I would race to the end of the hallway where my parents' room and my brother's room opened opposite from one another. If my parents' door was closed, as it usually was, I would opt for my brother, my Bubbie, my protector, my adored one. He never even awoke, but in his sleep just hugged me to him and I felt safe there. His window was also beside his bed, and I remember staring out that window at the streetlamp on the corner, feeling the soft breeze coming through the screen, and falling gently off to sleep. This same feeling still comes to me when my SO hugs me close to him during the night.

After I was grown, I carried this fear of the dark with me into my marriages, secretly. I didn't want to admit openly to being so silly, so scaredy-cat. My second husband was a traveling salesman. We lived in Jackson, Mississippi, far far from my old home. When he was gone, I slept with the lights on. What was it about those lights that made me feel more secure? I talked to my mother about once a week, and finally ventured to tell her about how noises in the night could paralyze me, make my heart pound uncontrollably. I'll never forget her response. She said, "Go see what they are." Go see? Actually get up and go find the thing making the noise. What a foreign idea that was to me. She said she had even gone outside in search of the thing that was making her afraid. "How can you do that?" I asked her. "Aren't you scared you'll run into a burglar or a prowler, or someone who wants to hurt you?" She replied, "If I'm outside I figure I can outrun them. Inside, I'm trapped."

Once I was raising my own children, I began to practice my mother's method. Get up and go find the thing that was frightening me. It always turned out to be the refrigerator, or a limb blowing against a window, a click-bug in the bathroom, or simply the house settling. I don't know when it happened exactly, but somewhere along the line, I stopped being afraid.

Years ago, before I ever had anything published, I attended a writer's conference in Houston. One of the instructors said something that stuck with me as well. She said, "Every day, do something that causes you unease, or that you dread." She was speaking mostly about learning to deal with rejection, with the business end of writing. Call an editor. Seek an agent. Submit a story. Get outside your comfort zone.

I recently had a little piece published in Birds and Blooms Magazine. It was submitted so long ago, I had actually forgotten about it. Two years ago, right after I built my greenhouse at the Buffalo Wallow, in my enthusiasm, I wrote a little article about backyard greenhouses. A few weeks ago, an issue of that magazine arrived, had been forwarded from Texas. I didn't even open the package when I saw who it was from, could not understand why I was getting this magazine when I had ended my subscription to it long before we made the permanent move here to the mountains. I figured they were just trying to induce me to re-subscribe. I tossed the package into a stack of other magazines waiting to be perused, on the trunk in the corner of the living room.

A few days later, my aunt called. She had been in her doctor's office, in the waiting room. She picked up a magazine, was reading along when she saw my name in the byline. She said she laughed out loud she was so surprised, and told another patient in the waiting room, "I just found an article my niece wrote." As I listened to her, I went over to the trunk where I had pitched the Birds and Blooms packet. I tore it open, and there it was, a thank you note from the editor, and my article inside the magazine covers.

Well, well. And what do you know! I am a writer -- still. Just one who isn't writing much at the moment. It isn't always simple to wrestle with the desire to write and the desire to live life. And let's face it, there is fear involved with writing. It's so damned personal, and has so much ego wrapped up in it, and you have to fight the feeling that a rejection is about more than just the work. I think it's this fear that keeps me from biting off the BIG, time-consuming, full-length novel that nobody might want to publish, or if published, to actually sit and READ. And there's this niggling thought in the back of my brain telling me it's risky, that it might, just might, have contributed to the failure of my marriage, and God knows I don't want this new relationship to fail, too. Because when I'm writing, everything else in my life is tuned out. It's not easy for me to find balance. But I'm trying every day to face this fear. Because the payoff, my name in a byline, a little teensy-weensy check, gives me the ultimate feeling of purpose.

Onward....