Favorite Family Stories

Having seen the post on FB, I just read an article about telling family stories to kids alongside books and imaginary tales and I got to thinking that we don't tell that many family stories.  But the kids do ask, most often about Aunt Banana stories (her funny Ramona-like antics--sorry, Banana!)

So why don't we tell more family stories?  I suppose in a way this blog is one long, detailed, rambling story of our everydays.  Sometimes, family stories just don't have much in the way of narrative arc or deeper meaning, and I often misremember or even make up details, but I can see that they still have value in creating a sense of belonging and connection and shared values.  So I've been thinking on the stories we already tell and the ones I probably should tell.

We do retell (and this is most but definitely not all):

• Aunt Banana stories:  the time she hung upside down in the coat closet; the time she tried to go to school in nothing but a plastic rain coat; about sleepin in her backyard fort
• Pop:  wanting a bicycle but his siblings told him he was getting a hand-trained parrakeet; riding the city bus to school; his mom taking him to the circus in a real circus tent; Aunt Sis taking him to see Sophia Loren in a movie; (we don't not talk about him and the Wildwood boys being mean to cats);
• Mommy:  planting my feet in the mud and saying I would grow; how I met Mama at the university library; catching a fish with no bait; insisting as a child on baking the exact same number of snowmen, gingerbread men, etc; being a Brownie and later working at Girl Scout camp for children with special needs; learning how to juggle; trying so hard to learn to crochet; 
• Mama:  drawing with her grandmother;
• Goo:  practicing for years to play piano;
• Sis:  "The Empress;" Shirt and Amy; in utero, she hit him during an ultrasound; she liked to pet and follow Morgan the cat; she would resist falling asleep in the car by twirling her hair and kicking her foot; how Sis scooted across the top of the snow after the blizzard
• Bud:  "Waving Bud;" (we don't tell about his stitches in his finger from the deer feeder or the staple in his head from the playground); loveys; in utero he would kick when I ate pineapple; he would fall asleep in the car with his arms tucked behind his head; 
• Sis and Bud together:  how they would roll over on each other and not be able to roll back; how they both liked to empty the contents of boxes; how I switched them at the hospital and didn't know I had til I changed the diaper!

Wow, that's not a lot.

Some I could tell:

• scary stories with silver linings:  hiding in the basement during the microburst when the tree hit the house and van; the blizzard with 3' of snow and higher drifts; being without electricity during Hurricane Irene; about Gommie and Pop's fire; also about the burglary when I was young; Ma and Gong in Hurricane Sandy; Mama and I living in NYC on September 11;  we already talk about Newtown.
• adventures:  my archaeological dig in Carthage, Tunisia; Mama climbing the rocks near the lighthouse in Maine; Mama and her family seeing the sunset over the mountains and driving fast to catch it over the ocean; Mama going skiing with Ma and Gong;  
• inspiring:  my cousin who found his calling as a Catholic monk in France; Goo working so hard to be a doctor; Ma and Gong immigrating to a foreign country (and their parents doing it before them!); my "life in a bed" and getting better; 
• funny or embarrassing:  my speaking to 1000 teachers only to discover later that my shirt was on inside-out!  Mama almost fainting when we found out we were having twins!  Gommie, who was in a cast with a broken foot, then getting gum in her hat's veil while shopping "in the big city."
• family history:  my ancestors fighting the Civil War; Mama's grandfather leaving China for Bangkok; Gong as a Buddhist monk; Gommie's dad fighting in WWII; the KKK running Gommie's grandad out of town because he was Catholic; (later) Gommie's mom being saved from an abusive husband by her brother; Pop's grandmother running a boarding house at the turn-of-the-20th century; Pop's mom going all the way to Berkleey in the twenties and earning her MA in History with a thesis on the Colfax riots; my great grandmother working at Camp Hulen during WWII and meeting her husband there;
• trips to Disneyworld and Disneyland (both Mama and I as kids separately, as adults together, and now with the kids); Nashville, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, "the bay," New Orleans twice (once during a tropical storm, no less), Chicago, Washington DC, Arkansas, Georgia, Philly, Boston, and NYC plus Greece, Italy, Turkey, Tunisia, England, France, Japan, Korea, and Thailand.

But there have to be others.  

For those of you who know me IRL (in real life) as they say, what would you add?  I'm going to work on remembering and valuing them as stories to pass along.

As a friend commented to me, when I said I couldn't remember many good stories:

Maybe there are no good ones. There are explanations of how things came to be, how you learned to do or not do things, things that remind you of other things. I think you just observe and talk - and observe and listen to your children, because they have stories too. Everyone should have the experience of being heard and considered.

A Magical Journey

We had just finished reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and I was casting about for a new book to read.  We tried Tom Sawyer, but the language was too regional and they couldn't follow all the dialogue.  I didn't want another fantasy novel back-to-back with Lewis's masterpiece but nothing we had on hand--Indian in the Cupboard, various Beverly Cleary books, other titles I can't recall right now--felt right.

Coincidentally, I had recently been exploring the art of storytelling.  While reading Katrina Kennison's Mitten Strings of God, a reflective piece on mothering which I would recommend for those inclined, I came across the works of Nancy Mellon, master storyteller.  Her Storytelling and Children preached to the choir about the importance of stories and the parent-child bond during storytelling; her Storytelling and the Art of Imagination laid out the details of story as soul medicine (almost to the esoteric realm with her focus on humours and healing) but also the symbolism (doors, huts, seeds, underground) and structure of traditional (exclusively European) tales.

Thus, in our book in-between time, it dawned on me to tell them a story.  When they had been very young, I'd told them tales of Sis and Bud Dragon who lived near a medieval-ly village and had adventures; they can't possible remember those, but Mama and I enjoyed them.  Why is the fantasy realm always medieval-ish?  Must be all of those European fairy tales.  Our current story started with the oldest house in Connecticut, where two twins had moved; exploring the house on a rainy day they find a chest--like the 18th-century one I bought at the neighbor's tag sale--and fall through it to a new land.  Funny where you get your inspiration.  In my mind, the house is the stone Henry Whitfield house we visited last year. The entry into the other world from within the house is Narnian but also familiar to us from the Droon series, with the basement stairs to another world.  And the creatures and adventures they encounter in that other world are inspired by The Never-ending Story, the Redwall books, fairy stories, Lord of the Rings, the Merlin stories, and others I probably don't even realize.

Some of Mellon's (regrettably slight) discussion of structure has stuck with me:  the narrative encompassing a protagonist, an opposition or challenge (often a quest or journey), helpers, more opposition and impediments alternating with helpers until there is resolution, well-being, unity, the proverbial happy ending (and she tells feminists not to sweat all the weddings!); the ideas of adventures in threes, fours, or twelves; the passing of the seasons; geographical variety from sea to mountains to forest to dessert; the appearance of the four elements of earth, air, water, and fire (we're adding the fifth element, in Chinese lore, metal).

After four installments, we are hooked.  Every morning Bud illustrates the previous night's chapter for a book he's making.  And they both spend the day and night making suggestions.  They suggests the flavors the characters drink from the magical water; they came up with the talking fire.

We did have to discuss that they are not the characters in the story specifically, which arose during a part when the boy suffered a temporary blindness.  We talked about how protagonists have to undergo trials before they can succeed.  It's not exactly Bruno Bettelheim's advocacy of danger and violence as teaching tools in tales, but it's not Disney either; maybe more Sondheim's Into the Woods.  But Bud is looking forward to hearing what happens to Sis's doppelganger!  And they make sure I balance out dialogue, adventures, and even gifts (she has the magic canteen of water and the firestarter; he has the magic compass always pointing them in the right direction--which means he needs something else!)

Each evening before we start, I panic a bit that I won't have anything for them, that they won't like the installation.  But between their enthusiasm, my bare outline from Mellon, and my own joy in it, the story comes and the only complaint has been that one night's story was too short.

I wonder what will happen tonight?  Once upon a time, remember or imagine . . . .