Stories
My grandpa had a set of favorite stories he used to tell. Again and again I’m different, as my kids can freely attest. My stories are never repeated. Really.
Anyway, he’d tell the story, and then slap his leg as he laughed at the punch line. He always wore blue overalls and a threadbare blue long sleeved work shirt, and usually dust would rise from his pant leg as he slapped his leg and celebrated his wit. Stories were often told when we stopped whatever we were doing for a drink, and my brothers and I would always encourage more stories, ‘cause that beat the hell out of walking beans or bucking bales. Looking back on it now, Grandpa’s sense of humor may have been a bit….different.
Grandpa and his father come upon a man laying in the ditch, with his daughter standing nearby. As grandpa described her: “she wasn’t quite right in the head.” Anyway, she looked down at her father, and exclaimed: “that damned old fool didn’t need to break all the eggs when he died.”
Ok, that may not, on first blush, seem to be funny. How about this one?
There was a neighborhood dispute about the road. For those of you who don’t live in rural areas, this is serious stuff. Around here, we sometimes hesitate to have strong opinions about foreign policy or the right amount of quantitative easing by the Fed, but we are all, farmers I mean, experts on drainage and road maintenance. Anyway, three neighbors are arguing, two on one side and one on the other. The guy with the minority opinion grabbed his shotgun and shot one of his tormentors, who was cultivating corn behind a mule and a two row cultivator. Fortunately, the intended victim was out of range and not seriously hurt. Then the frustrated hiway engineer headed for grandpa’s friend’s house, a fellow named Chal. He wasn’t home, so the guy with the shotgun went home and shot himself.
Upon hearing about all this, Chal, according to Grandpa, said: “huh, good thing he didn’t find me. One more dead man doesn’t make much difference to a dead man!”
Chal was something of a philosopher, who was featured in most of Grandpa’s stories. Once, Chal was hitching up a team when his mule dropped dead. Chal says: “huh. He never did that before!”
Ok, you get the idea. When I read William Faulkner, the Snopes family seemed pretty familiar. I once compiled all these stories, much as I have here, for a writing assignment in high school. I have to tell you, the teacher did not find my stories a suitable subject for sophomore English. It was not our only area of disagreement, and my grades over four years reflected our relationship pretty accurately.
Grandpa had a profound skepticism about the nature of humans, which is clearly reflected in these stories. He also had impeccable comic timing, which must have come naturally, because as far as I know, he never spoke to a crowd larger than his family. His stories connected me to the first part of the last century, and as time passes, I realize that those connections are rapidly disappearing. Every time I bore my grandchildren with the same old stories, I’m laying down connections and memories that will last till the end of this century. Stories are how we connect, and time spent telling stories is much more than a way to avoid work. Although that’s important, too.