Been Thinkin’ About…The zombie story house

The young maple leaves play a sweeping tapestry across the white limestone bricks, big, thick, crystal limestone the color of a tawny lion in a faraway land. The house was a good house, is a good house, but no one lives here, not anymore. The windows are dark and cold. A deep front porch faces east, view of the creek now blocked by condos. I also am facing east, staring at the back of the house, former back yard now simple blacktop warming in the afternoon sun. The house is itself a story and the windows are like eyes, watching.

"You're a great storyteller, Uncle Josh," my niece is saying on the phone. "When you tell stories, it makes people want to listen." I cannot say I am not pleased. I've always wanted to be a storyteller, ever since I could think of such things. My mom, my niece's grandma, was a true storyteller in the most natural of senses. There were no grandiose theatrics in her craft, no sweeping gestures or wide-eyed expressions. Her own sense of propriety would never allow such vulgar gratuitousness. Her voice, still in my mind, still in my soul, was quiet, soft, and low.

"I don't have a lick of vocal range," my mom would say, but she could play a 12-string guitar like a house on fire. I still miss hearing her play "Cripple Crick" and "Red Wing." Self-taught, my mom started playing when grandpa brought her a used guitar and she was something like only 11 or 12. And in a week, she was playing that used guitar like it was the most natural thing in the world. Words like "prodigy" didn't exist and rather than being fêted, her skill was mostly just accepted. Grand celebration of children was a gratuitous, vulgar thing. Nobody needs to grow up with a big head.

After that, though, after adulthood, my mom's guitar playing became something like an embarrassment to some in my mom's post-wedding world and by the time I came along, she almost only played guitar when no one else was around. More than once she would find her guitar placed carefully back in its case before friends came over. The guitar had been put away to ensure she wouldn't be tempted to pick it up and play it within earshot. Teenage friends from high school would laugh. The embarrassment might be too much. Some stories are better left untold.

"Donny, when you tell me about a place," our neighbor was saying, "it's just like I am there. When other people tell me about a place, it doesn't feel like anything." My mom just shrugged. How else would we tell stories? If you can't feel the thing, the place, the moment, why bother tell the story at all? Storytelling was like breathing. Such is how I learned to write, because I had first learned to listen. The world had dimension and depth and fullness because of the stories. I had two immediate comparatives. Of my dad's childhood, what did I know?

That he played with small cars and toys in a sandbox. That he had a newspaper route. That he wanted to play football but, because of his size and his eyesight, he was unable to do so. That he grew up faraway, on the East coast, near our nation's capitol. That he loved the fried clams at the Howard Johnson restaurant and that the cherry blossoms bloomed there in the spring.

That was it. There were no more stories. The world simply stopped and there were no open doors, no ways in to learn not just the story but the person in the telling. My mom, on the other hand? Her stories did not stop and they gave me sense of place and person, not just of my mom herself, but of everyone around her. I was on a first-name basis with family members who had died decades before I was ever born. I would look at their black-and-white photos framed on the wall and be filled with a warm sense of belonging. They were not strangers. I knew them, their words, their stories, their soul. And how their souls were also like mine, and I was a part of theirs. Time works different because of stories.

My great-grandpa died in 1954, if memory serves, but to me, he still lives, still breathes, still tells stories and rhymes and plays his fiddle and kneels at his bedside and prays for us all, his grandchildren, his great-grandchildren. What is time, anyway?

"I want to know how to tell stories," my niece is saying, and I am honored. Humbled. Gratified. I know she can. I know her lineage. I know her strength. Her need to tell the stories, any stories. The true stories are the first to be told, of course. Just the journalistic truth, simply observe, then tell what is. But words are powerful things and I cannot help myself.

"Well, first, honey," I find myself saying, "just say the thing that is. But remember, it's your story. You can do anything you want with your words. Take this house for example, with the young maple leaves playing a tapestry across the white limestone bricks. The shadows play hard here, and the basement windows are dark, dark and curious, because this is the zombie house, the zombie story house, and the zombies live deep down in a cold cave beneath the kitchen and at night, before a full moon, they begin to creep out across the front porch...."

"Uncle Josh, you're just makin' things up!" Of course. Of course, I am. But what good is a house like this if you can't make up stories about it? And I make my brief goodbyes over the phone, shoulder my workout bag, and head into the gym, sneakers soft on the hot blacktop. One more day, one more minute, one more breath. Our time is always so short. And so, in defense, we tell our stories, over and again. Because, what is time, anyway?