Story Time

Somewhere along the line the monkeys started to appreciate stories that don't come from their collection of children's books. I remember the first family story I ever told them was the classic about my dad throwing a metal John Deere toy tractor at the back of his brother's (good ol' Uncle Jim) head and momentarily knocking him unconscious. I thought the story was great and so when the girls were squirming in the van on a long drive, I told it to distract them from their boredom.

It was a hit and so I told other Dennis Brown classics -- the beehive, sinking Grandpa's truck in the ice, punching a hole in the wall of the school shop room, etc. Eventually, I ran out of Dennis stories and started to draw on my personal reserve. The girls are very familiar with the tale of Dad and Uncle Tony getting chased by a herd of wild cows while wearing no pants. (Actually, I was wearing pants. Tony was not. Long story.) They know about petting the baby hawk that was tearing apart a mouse in a meadow in West Yellowstone. They know about Dad throwing up while on a sledding date at the sand dunes outside Rexburg. (For that matter, they also know the "throwing up at the school assembly" story and the "throwing up on poor Cousin Karen after Kathie's wedding" story. Puke narratives are actually a whole genre in my storytelling oeuvre.) Besides throw-up stories, there are three general categories, -- Dad as a little boy, Dad as a teenager, and Dad as a missionary.

So the funny thing is, their appetite for stories never seems to relent but, even at the ripe old age of (almost) 34, I've only got so many stories to tell, y'know? If I start to retell one they've heard too recently they chorus, "We know that one, Dad!" So I've had to branch out from the grand narratives of my life story (y'know, the ones that involve pantlessness, angry cows, the threat of death, mutilation, and vomit) and I've had to start telling completely mundane memories that have stuck with me over the years.

The other night before bed, the monkeys were begging for a story. Now, I'm not dumb. I recognize that they are appealing to my vanity. They know if they ask Dad for a story from his past, they're likely to get another five or ten minutes of awake time before the inevitable turning off of the lights. But since I am vain and I do like telling them stories and because I've gotta respect their utter wiliness at ages 5 and almost 7, I usually give in.

So the random story I scraped out of my mental rafters was about Tony and I living in Provo just prior to his marriage to Cassie. We lived in the Riviera Apartments, worked at Frontier Pies, and spent the evenings roaming around Provo talking about life (women). One evening, there was some kind of church dance going on in a parking lot not far from our place so we moseyed over (they were playing Joshua Tree-era U2) and danced with a couple of dateless, lonely girls. After that, we bought a single bottle of Country Time lemonade from a gas station and walked onto one of BYU's many playing fields. We sat down on a pole vault landing pad and handed the bottle back and forth, wiping the top off with each pass. (Because that's so much more sanitary.) Anyway, as we talked, I eventually downed the last gulp of lemonade and absentmindedly handed the bottle back to Tony. He tilted it up to take a drink and got nothing. He laughed and said he thought I was kindly offering him the last swallow as a gesture of friendship and thoughtfulness. I burped and said, "Nope."

The girls were immensely tickled by this story for some reason. They thought handing Tony the empty bottle was the height of cleverness. A couple of days later, Maryn handed me the above picture that she'd drawn. She thought a pole vault was a tether ball pole so that explains the thing between Tony and I. The two details I love most about the drawing are #1 -- the sort of gleefully sadistic look on my face as I'm watching Tony try to drink from an empty bottle and #2 -- the phrase, "Be kool man be kool." That wasn't part of the story from the other night but Maryn, whose mind is a marvel of retention, remembered from way back when I told her that was Tony's favorite form of peer pressure. "C'mon, man," he'd say, "be cool. Just be cool." That she remembered that little detail delighted me to no end.


This, obviously, is another picture of autumn in my neighborhood. It is overcast, raining, and 55 degrees today so the warm, brilliant weather of last weekend is already sorely missed.