Storytelling

Stories have always fascinated me, just as they fascinate much of the country. Americans spend hundreds of billions of dollars on books and magazines each year and well over ten billion on movies. However, my personal obsession with stories didn’t begin with books or movies. My love for good tale began with my mother, Mary Lynch, formerly Mary Jane Loux.

When I was a child, I’d lay in bed with my mother and say, “Tell me a story about when you were a little girl.” As the orange glow from my mother’s lamp lit the thick white and blue comforter that warmed our legs, she’d speak, her eyes weary from a long day of parenting. I’d listen, mesmerized by a silly account of how she’d practiced shaving with a spoon, but how even with the training, she’d still cut her legs and once cut them so terribly she removed chunks from her skin. She shouldn’t have been shaving in a hurry, she’d told me, but she was heading out to go bowling with friends. I don’t recall whether she chose to wear pants that night, or just slapped bandages over the wounds and braved a skirt.

When I’d ask for another tale, my mother would tell the story of how her sister ran away from home with a box of brown sugar when she was only three. She’d tell me about playing Barbies with her neighbor Rosy, which was short for Rosemary, who said she didn’t have a middle name.

Boogie

Her yarns were vivid and she’d recall each aesthetic detail with great clarity. I asked again and again to hear the story of Freda, her tiny, grey and white cat. My mother and her five siblings always had cats around the house, and those cats occasionally had kittens. Boogie, one of Freda’s babies, thought it was a person. But, no matter how many cats entered the hearts of the Loux family, Freda was my mother’s favorite.

Freda Lynn

It was summer when Freda vanished. My mother searched and searched for her dear pet and finally found her some time later in a neighbor’s “lovely, shaded garden.” Freda was so happy there with the flowers, the white picket fence and goldfish pond that my mother couldn’t take her away from her new home. I can still remember how sad I was hearing this tale for the first time; it broke my heart.

My mother didn’t just teach me to appreciate stories, she taught me to tell them. Without her encouragement and gentle prodding, I may have lost this story-obsessed pattern of mine.

One evening, while my father reveled in his masculinity at hunting camp, my mother turned to me and asked, “Why don’t you tell me a story?”

“I don’t have any stories!” I’d said, dejectedly. I was seven.

“You have to think of some because one day your girl might ask you to tell her a story.”

At first it seemed a silly thought. I was young, why would I need to recount a story from my childhood?

Because, she’d said, if I didn’t practice telling them, I’d forget.

She was right. The stories I recall most lucidly from my childhood are those that I’ve told again and again and the others have been lost or exist only as shattered fragments failing to make real connective plot lines. My mother’s encouragement also allowed me to begin experimenting with fiction at a very young age and the stories I wrote down as a girl, however frighteningly unworthy of future publication they may have been, I can still recall explicitly.

My mother has always been a great source of encouragement. When asked by my brother, in her company, whether I’d want help self-publishing, she said, confidently, “No, she’s going for the big-time!”

This is why I love her, with all the love I can muster.

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