How I learned to love stories


“Jesus Christ!”  I said---with heavy intonation on the first syllable.  “Jee-zus.“  I had hit the dashboard and then crumpled to the floorboard of the car.  It was a 1940’s Chevy coupe, creamy beige with a red pin stripe along the sides. Tweedy tan upholstery with slender black and red threads pressed into my face.  I was six years old. 
My mother was driving and must have slammed the brakes.  No seat belts and I was small. Not that I really remember the event, but the story was repeated so often and I knew the context so well.  It was 1951 and before growth of full-time life in the suburbs.  My mother often drove into the city (San Francisco) from the small town north of the Golden Gate Bridge where we lived.  Medical appointments on Sutter or Post Streets.  Window shopping around Union Square.  A trip to the city entailed hat and gloves, some kind of coat.  Clothing that all went together, planned for an urban appearance.   Appropriate for walking on sidewalks (no sidewalks out in the unincorporated part of the county where we lived).   Old Kodaks show me in a gray and white checked coat and matching hat that my mother had sewed.  And white gloves.


What always embarrassed me when this story was recounted was my spirited and easy usurpation of adult behavior.  I must have been stunned.   My head must have hurt.  Mortified in a child way to have fallen off the passenger seat in my best clothes.


My dad swore.  That’s where my startling profanity came from.   He was from New York and Irish.  A born story-teller.  Expletives regularly erupted in my dad’s language, but their range was circumscribed.  It was all theological:  “Jesus Christ,” “Jesus H. Christ,” “hell,” “damn it,” “God damn it.”  Calibrated to the occasion and never casual.  I don’t recall ever hearing him use scatological terms.  Words like “shit” or “fuck” were unthinkably vulgar.  I never learned those words until much later, in the 1960s.  


My outburst of juvenile impiety took its place on the roster of family stories.  Storytelling was important in my family.   Dinner party conversation depended on stories.  I listened.  Partially grasped words and events stretched out as if along a tightrope of suspense.  The narrator---like an acrobat, red parasol in hand--- teetered step over step, the end just in sight.  I watched the grown-ups as any weave or wobble in the narrative elicited a flutter of surprise, a gasp , or groan.  I relished the listeners’ visible anticipation---what would happen?  Development, digression, denouement, and the devious pleasure of irony, seeped into my young understanding. 


Stories held other pleasures too, I learned.   The real secret of my father’s influence was not his firecracker profanity.  It was stories he told to me at bedtime.  My father’s stories always inched their way to a hilarious climax which I anticipated with a shiver of excitement no matter how many times I had heard them.  “Tell me the one about camp,” I’d beg.  The story about camp hinged on a description of my doting New York City grandmother packing trunks for my dad Frank and his younger brother, Howard---an uncle whom I’d never met.  The two grade school boys were sent off somewhere in upstate New York for the entire summer.  Two months’ worth of clothes and socks, underwear, plus two-piece jersey swimsuits---all in neat stacks. It was the late 1920s. Camp was a ritual for city families.  For me, a kid in California, the whole idea conjured up an exotic world:  the customs of the urban East where children were dispatched annually to the countryside. 


The boys were shipped off with their trunks, as the story went.  The only activities at camp recalled in my dad’s telling were swimming in a lake and baseball.  Digressions featured my dad’s mimicking his younger brother Howard’s whining falsetto.  “Frankie’s trying to drown me!”  “Frankie’s pitching me bean balls!”  “Frankie’s trying to kill me!”  Of food, counselors, or any edifying activities, nothing.  Just two skinny city boys playing in the sunshine until exhaustion.  An older boy brushing off his younger brother always trailing along---“Aw, Howie, don’t be a pest.”  My dad’s sole reference to the wonders of nature was that the constant whir of crickets kept him awake at night.


The denouement in the camp story was the boys’ return to the city.  My devoted grandmother who had packed the trunks with such care opened my Uncle Howard’s trunk (dramatic pause):  empty---except for one old shoe and a tree stump.  No description of what was in my father’s trunk.  This story was entirely at the expense of the pest.  


My father’s stories were a special good night ritual.  He did not tell them every night, or even very often, as I remember.  Whatever were the exceptional occasions for them, I don’t know any longer. But I can see the outline of my Father on the edge of the bed, on my left side.  I can see the bed’s frame, a Jenny Lind style spooled bedstead.  My father’s face is a shadow; I cannot see his features.  But the lake glistening in summer sunshine, the shouts of the boys, a distant baseball diamond, and the empty trunk are all there.


 See more personal essays in East Village Magazine at http://eastvillagemagazine.org/

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