Story Time

If you know my Dad, you know he’s a story teller. If you’ve spent more than five minutes with my Daddy, you’ve heard a story. I’ve heard hundreds of his stories and some of them, I’ve heard a hundred times. But it’s OK, because I find them riveting and funny and touching. As he tells me these stories, he’s sharing a part of him. It’s not just living history, but it’s personal history. If I’m an extension of him, these stories are an extension of me. 

My favorites include:

• There was the time he was in the Army and stationed in France in the early 1960s and he and some buddies decided to sneak into and hang out in an abandoned WWII French bunker, complete with rations, unexploded artillery, and some 20+ year-old smokes.

• In our attic, among some of his belongings, is a beret belonging to a solider of the Armée de Terre (the French Army) in the early 1960s. He has explained that this was a souvenir from his time in France and has offered few details concerning a night of pub crawls, a drunken brawl between some American and French soldiers, a bridge, and some exchanged slurs. Politically correct? Nope. Badass? You betcha.

• “The ‘Potato’ Story.” This story is infamous in our family. It involves a family we grew up with who had several children, all boys, all fairly close in age, and about as wild and mischievous as they come. The toilet was clogged and the Mom called the plumber, who proceeded to get to work on the pot with an audience of all of these boys. He says while working, “did you all flush something down here that you shouldn’t have?” One nodded and said something that made the plumber’s hair stand up on his neck. “Kitty.”  He went to the Mom and said, “m’am…do you…ahem…did you…have a cat?” Much to his relief, she replied, “no, we don’t have a cat.” Relieved, he returned to the job and finally retrieved the source of the clog. It was then that he uttered these now famous, if not off-color, words:  “it’s a G**-damned potato!”

• The last one is about a neighbor I don’t remember and a dog I never knew and whose name Daddy doesn’t recall. For the sake of this retelling, we’re going to call the dog “Guvnah.” Across the street from the house in which I grew up lived a comely older divorcee named Cora. Now, we moved when I was nine years old and I only saw Cora a few times in those first nine years of my life, but when I think of her, I picture Anne Bancroft from The Graduate.  Cora apparently had a dog named Guvnah. Daddy came home from work one day and saw Guvnah lying in the road, struck dead. Doing the rational thing, he hid Guvnah in some bushes until Cora got home and he could break the news to her. Imagine his surprise when Cora answered his knock and there beside her stood Guvnah. Daddy then had to retrieve a dead dog from her bushes.

What I love maybe most about these stories is they give me insight and glimpses of the Dad I didn’t know. I’ve known him and am part, big or small, of the stories from the last 41 years of his life. It’s the stories from the first 32 years that he was here that interest me most. And I feel an obligation to protect these stories and pass them on.

You know, for hundreds and thousands of years, families’ and communities’ histories were passed down verbally. Your parents told stories that you then shared with your kids and those were living history lessons. Cavemen weren’t boring their kids with old home movies. “Look, kids, wanna see the trip your Mom and I took to the Tar Pits?” No, there was a long time back then when there were no physical mementos, no tangible souvenirs. We had only stories to remind us of where we’d been.

So, last week, Daddy told me this story, which I’d either forgotten or had never heard. As a bank branch manager, he was involved with the building of a new branch here in Nashville from the ground up. As the bulldozers were grading the lot, they ran into a grave. It held a simple, wooden coffin so old that it contained nothing. No creepy skeleton, no bones whatsoever, no clothes, nothing. This was not enough to derail construction and so it continued until they hit a second grave. It was then that the experts had to be called out. I’m sure there were representatives from historical societies, archaeologists, historians, forensic pathologists, and a whole host of people in hazmat suits with tiny brushes and magnifying glasses. After an intense examination of the property, they ruled that it was just the two graves, construction could continue, and that the bank merely needed to mark the two graves in some way. Since there was no way of knowing the deceased, a standard tombstone was not possible. Plus, that doesn’t really say, “come on in and open a checking account.” Instead, he explained that they put these two, small marble or granite markers in the ground to mark the spot of these two graves. Interest piqued and enthralled by this, he read my mind and said, “you want to go see them, don’t you.” Of course I did.  So we drove out there today.

As we pulled in, I asked, “does it look the same?” and he acknowledged that, despite the bank having a new name (probably one of countless in the last four decades) and the area around the bank having been over developed, the actual building and parking lot remained pretty much the same.

We got out of the car and he walked right to a small patch of grass in front of the building. And we looked. And we looked some more. And there were no little markers. We moved to another patch of grass. Nothing.

There was a bank employee out for a smoke break so he struck up a conversation with her, partly so they didn’t call the cops on us and partly to see if she happened to know about these two graves. He told her a short version of the story. She listened but offered no insight. And it occurred to me how fragile our history and our stories are. How many people are alive right now who know about these two graves. Four? Maybe five? And of these four or five, how many of them care, to be honest? I’ve found there are two types of people — the history buffs, such as myself. Those who thrive on the stories, the characters, the people, the lives. And then there’s the rest of the world. The “here and now” folks. The “are we really destined to repeat it if we don’t learn from it?” set.

And there you have it. My plea that you listen to stories when someone offers one. And that you share your own before they’re forgotten.