on telling stories

I always pause for a long time before telling a story to my son. I have a basic construct of an intrepid groundhog Beanie, his brother Jerry and his genius (for a groundhog) friend Roger. The humor in those stories generally relies on the suprising perspective of discovering the human world through a small furry mammal’s eyes. Of course the chaps are personified, but they have quaint and unknowledgeable ways of viewing the world which my son often finds very entertaining. He has, on occasion, laughed uncontrollably.

I’ve also made my brother and sisters laugh uncontrollably, with a series of stories labeled the “Monkey Stories.” The humor in those stories relied upon over-the-top absurdity and slapstick. We used to lay in our beds when we were supposed to be going to sleep, and I would spin yarns about a band of speaking monkeys who were lavishly rich, endlessly playful, and predictably destructive. I used their wealth as a cover-all for the damage they invariably did. The premise: a scientist had discovered a way to enable monkeys to talk before tragically passing from the scene. This troop of 100 or so monkeys inhabited every cranny and nook of their deceased scientist friend’s house. They did strange things like nailing all the furniture to the ceiling. The washed all the dishes in the large circular above ground pool in the back yard. The prized bottle tops over money, they had invented a nearly indestructible substance called rock liver (a composite of liver and egg whites, liberally burned) and they believed in several simple axioms such as “nails can fix anything, including eggs.”

Their nails fetish was even enshrined in rhyme:

Nails, nails,
Nails are good for a number of things,
Nails, nails.

They loved specific foods such as smurfberry crunch. They adopted names of cartoon characters for themselves. There was a puny monkey named He-Man (who became a leader of the monkeys and eventually their mayor) and Orko, his lumbering, brutish side kick.

They drove cars, they built houses, crashed boats and carried out war game exercises with an endless supply of an explosive but non-destructive powder called fuzzy. (Fuzzy bombs were a staple of their daily machinations.)

Those were simpler days. I never worried about anthropomorphism or speciesism, or violent content in those stories. I simply focused my mind on evoking the most laughter possible from my spellbound victims, and often I succeeded in spades.

I and my two sisters (we were the 1st, 2nd and 3rd born) moved to Oklahoma to stay with relatives while my brother and youngest sister moved with our parents to South Carolina. This move was the harbinger of the end of the monkey story. We all missed each other terribly during that year, and I tried to buck up everyone’s spirits by concocting monkey stories in one or two letters, but the going was harder without that instantaneous feedback of sibling cackling which told me if the humor was still live, or if the content was lapsing into the technical, and causing minds to drift.

And indeed, there were, occasionally, the largely unfunny monkey stories, which were purely epic tales of wars, and heroes, and lovely hairy damsels causing distress. But without an audience, the monkey stories didn’t seem to build, and I suppose, that my failure to export their manufacture to the dusty hillocks of the Cimmarron valley was also a harbinger of another kind; the harbinger of my problem with writing. I haven’t written anything longer than a poem or a journal entry since.

When we returned to South Carolina my siblings used to beg me for a monkey story. And it wasn’t just the younger two, it was all of them. We all were reaching backward for a simpler time, a time before a year of separation had started us on subtly different tracks whose distinct experiences were not intimately shared, but rather only conveyed by the simple mechanisms that children use. We began to become grown-ups.

Most of my siblings’ experiences after that point were not so closely related to my own. I heard about my brother’s unutterable rage toward certain bullies at school. I knew those bullies, and I knew exactly what he felt: I had had run-ins with those bullies’ older brothers. I don’t remember if I ever said anything to my brother during that time. I saw my sisters date some good guys and some jerks, and eventually I saw two of them marry. But I am thirty-two now and am just beginning to grasp the importance of reaching out to others in their hour of need. And I am a sensitive child.

We have come, now, to separate adulthoods, and have begun the struggle back towards each other. In some sense it seems to me almost as if we are long-lost from each other. The hearkening back to earlier days is so poignant to some of us, and may seem pointless to others of us. I don’t know what all my siblings think. I’m one who feels the poignancy of a childhood I wished I had done more to enlighten, delight, protect and prolong.

I previously had this published on my website, but never on my blog. My apologies to my readers who have read this “reprint” before.